How to place a trade?

What you’ll learn

• The basic options for executing a trade
• The terminology of trading execution
• The input options for making a trade
• How to combine trading with strategy
• How to close out a trade

You might assume that learning how to actually place a cryptocurrency trade would be among the first things included in our section on trading cryptocurrency. It isn’t.

We put the emphasis on first understanding what trading is, the concept of risk and what moves price, as well as the common approaches to making trading decisions. 

This article assumes you have given those subjects sufficient consideration and want to go ahead and actually execute trades. 

In order to make things as clear as possible we will use examples from Binance and Coinbase, though other exchanges are available. We have no relationship with either.  

Coinbase is good for beginners because it really simplifies the process but ease of use shouldn’t be your only consideration.

Placing a trade incurs commission and fees, which vary depending on the exchange. These fees are relatively high at Coinbase (and quite difficult to understand) and much lower at Binance, where the interface includes trading options which are more intimidating and assume a degree of knowledge. 

Refer to our article on choosing an exchange to understand more about the different considerations. For the purposes of this article we’ll use examples from both, depending on the context. 

We also assume that you have already created and funded your account; if you want to see a walk-through of those processes, please read this article.