Spot, futures and perpetuals
Three ways to hold a view on the same coin. What you own in each, what leverage really is, what expiry and funding do to you, and how to place each one on Wingman.
Education, not investment advice. The contract size, margin and expiry for the product you are about to trade are shown live on the ticket; this page explains what they mean.
Spot is not protected. Wingman's guardians (algo guard, profit floor, liquidation guardian) act only on futures and perpetual contracts. Spot has no leverage and can't be liquidated — but it also has no auto-stop and no auto-exit. You sell spot yourself when you want out. Turning protection on while you're on Spot does nothing.
Place 1 contract, or a few dollars of spot, first — just to learn the buttons and see a fill before real size is on the line. A mistake on 1 contract costs cents; the same mistake on 200 doesn't. Or practice with fake money on the simulator.
The three markets, side by side
| 🪙 Spot | 📅 Futures (dated) | 📈 Derivatives (perpetual) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you own | The coins. 1 XRP is 1 XRP, in your spot wallet. | A contract: an agreement about the coin's price on a fixed date. You never hold the coins. | A contract with no fixed date, priced to track the coin. |
| What you pay up front | The full price of the coins. | A margin deposit per contract — a fraction of the contract's value. That fraction is the leverage. | A margin deposit per contract, the same way. |
| Size of one unit | 1 coin. | One contract = a fixed number of coins (shown on the ticket; XRP contracts are hundreds of coins each). | One contract = a fixed number of coins (shown on the ticket). |
| When it ends | When you sell. | On the expiry date it settles in cash at the final price and disappears from your account — whether you were watching or not. | When you close it. (Coinbase's U.S. “perpetual-style” contracts carry a far-off expiry — the XPP product id ends in 20DEC30 — and behave as perpetuals until then.) |
| Carrying cost | None. | None day to day; the difference between the futures price and spot is the market's view of carry. | Funding: a small payment that passes between longs and shorts at intervals set by the exchange, to keep the contract near spot. The current rate and next time are on the ticket. |
| Can you lose more than you put in? | No. The coins can go to zero, not below. | Yes, until the exchange liquidates you. Margin is a deposit, not a cap. | Yes, the same way. |
| Short (profit from a fall)? | Not directly. | Yes — sell a contract you do not hold. | Yes. |
| Wingman's guardians | Do not act on spot. | Algo guard, profit floor and liquidation guardian all apply. | All apply — this is where Wingman was built. |
“One contract at 1.5776 for $68 — what does that do for me?”
Take the ticket exactly as it read. The contract size is on the ticket; for an XRP contract of 500 coins the arithmetic is:
you post $68.00 of margin → $788.80 ÷ $68.00 ≈ 11.6× leverage
every $0.01 move in XRP = 500 × $0.01 = $5.00 on that one contract
XRP +10% (to 1.7354) → +$78.88 · XRP −10% (to 1.4198) → −$78.88 — more than the $68 you posted
That last line is the whole point of leverage, in both directions. The $68 is not the price of anything; it is the deposit the exchange holds against the $788.80 you are exposed to. A move of about 8.6% against you wipes the deposit, and the exchange will liquidate the position before that to protect itself — at its price, not yours. The liquidation guardian exists to close some contracts before that point, under your settings.
If it is a dated future, the ticket also shows the expiry. On that date the contract is settled in cash at the final price: a gain is paid to you, a loss is taken from you, and the position is gone. If it is the perpetual, there is no date; instead funding passes between longs and shorts at the exchange's interval, which can quietly add up on a position held for weeks.
Why the prices don't match
Spot, the dated future and the perpetual are three different order books with three different prices. They move together but they are not the same number — the future carries the market's expectation to its date, the perpetual carries its funding. The ticket names the exact product it is pricing and charts that product, so the price you review is the price you trade. The cockpit's spot chart is a different market from the perp ticket; that is not an error, it is two markets.
When can you trade?
The 4 PM ET daily mark is also when dated positions can roll or settle — if you hold a contract through it, it can close itself.
When the day turns — the low and high hours
A coin doesn't make its low and its high at random times — over many days, the low tends to cluster in some hours and the high in others. On Signals we show, from our own tape, the hour brackets where each has usually fallen, with the sample size and the misses shown. What people study from it: which hours have tended to be cheap, and which have tended to be rich.
How to place each one on Wingman
Spreading a view across the three
Nothing says you must pick one. A common shape, described here as an illustration and not a recommendation: keep the part you believe in for years in spot, where the worst case is the coins going to zero and there is no deposit to wipe; take a view that has a date attached — a launch, a decision, a settlement — with a dated future, sized so the margin is money you can lose; and do the short-term trading in the perpetual, with a guard armed, where Wingman can watch it minute by minute. The audit tab shows all three in one statement, reconciled, so you can see what each part actually did to your balance.
The one rule that applies everywhere: leverage does not change how much the coin moves, it changes how much of that move lands on you. Decide the size from the loss you can accept, not from the gain you hope for.
Words on the ticket
Wingman is software, not an adviser. Everything above describes how these instruments work and how the buttons on this site behave; it does not tell you what to buy. Futures and perpetuals can lose more than you deposit. The figures for the product in front of you — size, margin, expiry, funding — are on the ticket, live from the exchange.