A portion of the inflows into bitcoin ETFs is driven by the"basis trade", where investors seek to profit from the price difference from the spot and futures price.exchange-traded funds have attracted vast amounts of media attention in 2024, and rightly so, for being the most successful ETF launch of all-time.. The nine newborn ETFs excluding Grayscale Bitcoin Trust hold 646k BTC.
According to checkonchain data, on Oct. 11, the last full trading day, the bitcoin futures market traded $53.4 billion, the spot market traded $4.5 billion and the ETFs traded $2 billion. This means ETF trading volume accounted for roughly just 3% of the total bitcoin market volume that day.It is difficult to know the exact percentage of inflows into the ETFs that are tied to the"basis trade", which is also known as the cash and carry trade.
This is a market-neutral trade, as the investor is both long and short the same asset. The futures position offsets any movement in the underlying ETF's spot price, allowing the investor to lock in the arbitrage premium without being exposed to directional market risk., to review IBIT's largest holders, which have been disclosed in the 13-F filings, where institutions with over $100 million in assets under management must report ETF purchases.