Copy trading

Copy trading is gaining in popularity, it’s where you can copy the trades (buying or selling) of successful traders. With Bybit, you can see loads of information about the trader – all of their trades, how much they’ve earned, how often their trades are successful, if they’re on a winning streak, and their return on investment (how much they've made compared to how much they've invested), plus loads more.

This is great information to have, but it gets better – you can actually copy their trades automatically, so when they make a trade, so will you. It can make things easier if you haven’t yet got a winning trading strategy yourself – but of course, copying someone else is a risk, and you might end up losing money.

You can learn more about how copy trading works on the Bybit website¹.

Bybit trading platform

Let’s get to the trading platform itself, if you’ve traded before, you’ll be very familiar with the setup and layout – it’s pretty much the classic crypto exchange view. So, there’s the main chart, with the current and historic price(s), alongside the trading volume too. You can then add and customise the display with more information if you like.

There’s also the ‘order book’, with the current buy and sell orders for the specific coin, alongside all the recent trades.

If you haven’t traded before, it can be a bit confusing, but you’ll soon pick it up – it’s fairly intuitive.

There’s also the whole range of trading tools that you might need, for instance limit orders (setting a price to buy and sell at), stop-loss orders (setting a price to sell at if a trade isn’t going your way), and take profit orders (setting a price to sell at automatically).

If you’re a keen trader, and use your own software, you can even plug directly into their platform (via an API) to make traders, or use 3rd party software such as MetaTrader 4 (popular with currency traders).

Unified trading account

If you’re keen to make use of all the different types of trading options, such as spot trading, derivatives trading (trading the price of a coin), and options trading, Bybit offers a ‘unified trading account’ which brings all your trading accounts together to better manage your trades and risk.

Normally, on other crypto platforms, you’d have to manage your different trading options separately, which can get complicated and time consuming.

Trading bot

Bybit also has a trading bot feature, where you can set up automated trades without having to use your own software or code anything. It’s pretty cool if you’ve got winning trading strategies and you want to make the most of them – simply automate them and trades will trigger when certain rules are met (e.g. buy at certain prices when certain things are met, such as low trading volume, or a huge range of technical indicators).

And if you haven’t got your own winning strategies yet, there’s a range of public trading bots that you can simply copy (you’ll see how much they make too).

Range of investments

There’s a huge range of investment options with Bybit, which ranges from buying and owning the crypto directly (called spot, or spot trading), to derivatives trading. We’ll cover those below.

Overall, there’s close to 500 coins available to trade directly, with new ones added regularly (and in fact you can vote for new ones to be added).

There’s of course all the major coins, such as bitcoin and ethereum, and a wide range of coins on various crypto industries, such as tokens relating to Ethereum, decentralised finance (DeFi), Metaverse, and even Meme coins as a category. We won’t go into what all of these are now, but you can learn loads about them on the Bybit website¹.

Derivatives

Derivatives offer a huge range of trading options, and often the most popular of these are ‘perpetual contracts’, which effectively allows you to trade the coin without buying it directly. 

This allows you to use advanced trading strategies much easier, such as leverage trading (also called margin trading), or trade both price directions, so you can speculate the price will go down (go short).

Leverage

Leverage is where you can trade with more money than you actually have in your account – you essentially use your account balance as a deposit to borrow and trade with more, for instance, you could have £50 in your account, and with 5x (or 5:1) leverage, you could make a trade worth £250 instead.

If, with your trade, the price of the coin increased by 10%, you’d have made 10% of £250, so £25, rather than 10% of £50, which is £5.

Pretty good right? However, this also works in reverse, so if the price dropped by 10%, you’d have lost £25, rather than £5. It’s very high risk – so please use it sensibly.

There’s also ‘leveraged tokens’, which are tokens with a set amount of leverage already built in, for example (3x long bitcoin).

Bybit offers up to 100x leverage on some coins (such as bitcoin), which is one of the highest ranges out there.

Note: in the UK, derivatives on cryptoassets are only allowed for experienced investors (by law).

Futures and options

There’s also a big range of futures and options – these are things you can trade, and they’re set contracts that allow the holder to buy (or sell) a coin at a set price in the future.

With futures you must buy or sell at the expiry date (of the contract). With options, you simply have the option to buy or sell at the expiry date.

Note: perpetual contracts (perps) are a type of future without an expiry date – making them super popular, and very similar to buying and owning the coin directly.

These can be very popular with advanced traders and a great way to manage risk for certain trading strategies.

Bybit fees

Let’s dive into the fees – something super important in trading. Overall, Bybit is very low cost.

There’s no fees to open an account, or any ongoing account fees, like some traditional stock brokers. Instead, you’ll pay a fee when you buy and sell (make a trade). These are called make and taker fees.

A maker fee is where you set the price you want to buy at (called a limit order), and when the price is reached, your order will be executed. This benefits the exchange with more volume of orders (you are making liquidity), and are typically lower than taker fees.

Taker fees are where you take liquidity, and buy the asset at the price it is right now (the market price) – so your order (buy or sell request) will be executed immediately.

With Bybit, there’s different fees depending on what type of trading you are doing – there’s 3 options, spot (buying and owning crypto directly), derivatives, and options.

With spot trading the fees are low and start at 0.10% for both maker and taker fees, and reduce all the way down to 0.02% (taker) and 0.005% (maker). The more you trade and have in your account, the higher your ‘VIP’ level will be, which results in lower fees.

The fees are even lower for trading derivatives and options – we won’t cover them here, but you can find all the details on the Bybit website¹.

For comparison, Binance, another popular exchange, the fees are also low and start at 0.10%, and with Coinbase, one of the most popular exchanges, the fees are much higher and start at 0.60% (taker) and 0.40% (maker). Quite a big difference!

Customer support

The customer support is great.

There’s a huge help centre, with pretty much every question you’d ever want to ask covered. There’s also live chat, which operates 24/7 (Bybit is global), and is where you can speak to someone directly, all through the website or app – there’s a good response time too.

You can also send in a support ticket, and someone will get back to you via email.

Is Bybit safe?

Bybit is a safe exchange to use – it’s one of the most popular exchanges in the world.

All of the customers’ money is kept on a 1:1 basis. That means it’s not loaned out (like it is with a bank or some other crypto exchanges), but kept in ‘reserve’ in protected accounts.

In fact, there’s more money stored than customers actually have, so if all the customers withdrew their money at once, there would still be lots left over. Giving customers that extra bit of reassurance.

The accounts are regularly audited to ensure that everything is all in order (this is called ‘proof of reserves’), and you can see it on the Bybit website¹.

At the moment, crypto isn’t regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), who are the people making sure financial services companies are looking after your money – but this could be coming soon.

Bybit customer reviews

On the popular reviews website Trustpilot, they have a score of 2.7 out of 5, although only from 500 reviews.

In crypto, shockingly, that’s actually pretty good. Crypto companies get lots of bad reviews as people have unfortunately lost money on various coins and trades, or lost more than expected as they use leverage trading but don’t understand it (so make sure you do before using it!), or they’re unable to verify their identity to use the platform. They then tend to take this frustration out on the exchange.

For instance, Coinbase has a rating of 1.4, Binance has a rating of 2.1 and even banks like HSBC have a rating of 1.4.

Overall though, for Bybit's actual platform and service, there’s lots of 5 star reviews stating how great the platform is, the wide range of coins, low fees, and great customer support.

With the apps it’s highly rated on both Apple (4.6 out of 5), and Google (4.6 out of 5).

Bybit pros and cons

Here’s a quick recap and the pros and cons of Bybit:

Pros

• Very low cost
• Fast and reliable
• Great range of coins
• Excellent trading platform experience (and app)
• Loads of features for traders
• Well established and secure
• Great for beginners to learn

Cons

• Can be confusing initially for beginners
• Not much else!

Our thoughts

We really like Bybit, it’s a great crypto exchange, and perfect for beginners all the way to experienced traders – being easy to use, and with loads of advanced features and trading options.

It’s also potentially one of the fastest and most reliable trading platforms out there.

The platform experience itself is great, with tools and a great charting system, along with a great mobile app for on-the-go trading.

There’s a wide range of coins available, and loads of advanced trading options such as futures and options (for experienced traders).

The trading fees are very low, starting at 0.10% and reducing with the more you trade (and even less for futures and options).

Overall, 5 stars from us. If you’re keen to get started, head over to the Bybit website¹.