Spot Trading
Learn how to trade spot on Vertex.
In this tutorial, you’ll find a step-by-step walkthrough on how to place your first spot trade including:
- An introduction to Spot markets on Vertex.
- Selecting/switching markets.
- Trading with or without leverage.
- Using a market or limit order.
- Entering the trade details.
- Placing the trade.
- Managing your trade/Cancelling an open order.
Spot refers to the buying and selling of actual assets, as opposed to derivatives contracts on the underlying (such as perpetuals).
On Vertex, all spot assets trade against USDC and settle in balances. Buying an asset on the spot market requires you to exchange USDC. Selling an asset means you’ll receive USDC.
Users also have the option to turn ON leverage. This enables the ability to buy or sell more than you currently own through borrowing. This is covered in more detail below.
To learn more about Spot on Vertex, click here.
Trading Tip: if there are any unfamiliar terms on the trading page (entry or market info), try hovering to see the tool-tip message
To trade spot assets, navigate to the Spot page using the top navigation bar on the app or the hamburger menu on mobile (top left).
- If on mobile: make sure you are on the Trade tab below the chart.
- First, you’ll need to select the asset you want to buy or sell.
- Click on the All Markets drop-down in the top left (beside the Orderbook price).
- Select the asset you trade.
- Below the market selection, you will find a Leverage OFF/ON option (starts OFF by default).
- Leverage enables you to borrow and increase your trading size:
Example: if you have 100 USDC but a substantial amount of margin open, you will be able to buy more than 100 USDC of ETH. This would be reflected as a USDC borrow (i.e., a negative USDC balance) after the trade executes.
To summarize:
- Leverage ON + Buying = Enables borrowing USDC to buy more of an asset.
- Leverage ON + Selling = Enables borrowing an asset to sell.
Leverage OFF: Think of this as regular spot trading, where you can only sell and buy using what you have (no borrowing).
To choose, click on Buy or Sell.
- Buying = Exchange USDC, receive the asset.
- Selling = Sell asset, receive USDC.
- Users now need to decide what type of trade (order) they wish to place:
- Limit – Set a limit price at which you are willing to buy or sell the asset. The order will only fill at that price or better.
- Market – The trade executes immediately against the best possible price across the hybrid liquidity of the orderbook and AMM pools.
- Simply click on either Limit or Market to choose.
- When choosing to place a market order, users may wish to adjust slippage tolerance.
- Slippage is the max deviation from the current orderbook price a trader is willing to execute.
- Default slippage is set to 0.5%.
- To adjust slippage:
- Click on the Gear icon to the right of the order types.
- Click on the entry box.
- Type in the desired slippage.
- Enter the trade details.
If placing a limit order, traders must enter a limit price.
- There are three options for entering trade size:
- Type in the amount of Asset you wish to buy or sell.
- Type in the total amount of USDC you wish to sell (buying) or receive (selling).
- Use the leverage slider (via intervals of 10%) to decide a percentage of max trade size.
- Press the Place Buy/Sell Order button below.
- Confirm the trade (transaction) in your wallet.
- After a trade executes, new balances are updated in the table below the main chart or by navigating to the Portfolio page.
- To cancel open orders:
- Navigate to the Open Orders sub-page in Portfolio or the Open Orders table below the chart on the trading page.
- Press Cancel to cancel the order.
- Confirm in your wallet.
- At the moment, there are no Trigger order types on Vertex, such as Take Profit and Stop Loss.
- However: TP can be manually approximated by adding a limit order against existing positions.
- Stop losses will be added at a later date.
Vertex is working on delivering TP, SL, and multiple other order types in the coming months. Please stay tuned for updates on the timeline of the new order-type releases.
Last modified 1mo ago