u/Nomadictionnn

Long-ish post sorry. I think this fills a gap I never see addressed here.

I came to ZH in 2017 from Stuttgart. Engineer, B-permit converted to C last year, in my late 40s. My income is fully CHF but a chunk of my parents' inheritance landed in 2022 in EUR and stayed in EUR because converting at that rate would have been criminal. Around 165k EUR currently.

For about eighteen months that sat in my UBS EUR sub-account earning 0.0 (yes zero, they don't pay anything on EUR retail balances unless you're private banking tier). I was paralysed.

The conventional Swiss advice is "convert and put it in your 3a/IBKR strategy" but that locks the currency move at whatever EURCHF is doing on that single day.

What I ended up doing, and what I'd do differently:

Bulk parking.

I moved about 90k into a Raisin/WeltSparen ladder through their CH onboarding. 12, 24, 36 month tranches across three different EU banks with deposit-guarantee coverage up to 100k per bank per country. Yields between 2.9 and 3.4 at time of opening. Boring but the floor is now real instead of negative-real.

Money-market piece. About 35k into Xtrackers EUR Overnight (XEON on Xetra, accessible via IBKR or Swissquote). ESTR-tracking, pays ECB rate minus a small spread. Liquid in T+2. This replaced what was sitting at UBS doing nothing.

Yield enhancer, small. Roughly 15k spread across two P2P platforms with conservative loan models. One is LANDE which is ECSP-licensed Latvian, agriculture loans with first-rank mortgage at low LTV. The other is Maclear, a Swiss-based platform doing SME loans with collateral agent rather than buyback.

Quick aside because someone will ask: is Maclear FINMA licensed? No. It's a member of PolyReg SRO which covers AML/KYC under the Swiss FINMA AML regime, not investment-firm supervision.

That's materially different from what Mintos has in Latvia (MiFID II with the €20k investor compensation scheme). I picked both intentionally because they have different failure modes and different regulatory backstops, which is the actual point of diversification but I'm not pretending one substitutes for the other.

Bond bridge. The remaining 25k went into individual short-duration EUR investment grade corporates bought directly through Swissquote, not a fund, ladder out to 2028.

Tax side because nobody mentions it. Interest income is fully taxable as income on your CH return.

No Verrechnungssteuer because foreign-source. Wealth tax on year-end balance same as a bank account. You do declare on DA-1 to claim any withholding back where applicable. P2P specifically you have to keep platform statements because the cantonal tax office has no idea what these platforms are and will ask.

What I would not do, looking back. I would not have sat on it for eighteen months. The opportunity cost was something like 5k of safe interest I left on the table while overthinking. And I would not have converted everything to CHF in one shot in 2022 even though half the friends in my circle did. Currency-cost-averaging over multiple years if you must convert.

Nothing here is financial advice obviously. Just one CH-resident's path to making EUR cash not be dead weight. Curious if others have done a different mix, especially anyone using EUR-denominated bond funds traded on Swiss exchanges (I avoided them because of TER vs my direct-bond approach but maybe wrong).

ok so. weeks 1 through 3 i was queasy on and off as expected. weeks 4 through 8 totally fine, no nausea, eating normally, even forgot i was on it some days. then last week BAM, woke up Tuesday feeling exactly like week 1 again and its been 5 days of it now.

context: 7.5mg, been on this dose since week 5, no titration bump coming up. havent skipped a shot. only thing thats different is i was traveling last weekend and was eating out more (more grease, some alcohol), but im back on normal food since monday and its not letting up.

im on compound prescribed through сhia and already messaged my care team asking if its the batch, the dose, or something else going on. waiting to hear back. figured id ask here in parallel because this sub usually catches stuff before clinicians do, and when i searched 'second wave' or 'nausea returning' i mostly got people in their first few weeks which isnt where i am.

one thing i didnt connect until i started writing this: i got a refill at week 7. new vial, presumably new batch. timeline lines up suspiciously well with when the nausea came back. not saying thats it, but feels worth mentioning.

couple things im trying to figure out:

is this normal 'your body is recalibrating' stuff that happens around month 2 or 3 for some people, and just kind of waves through

or is it a sign the dose has actually caught up with me and i should be talking about adjustment (down? hold? idk)

or could it genuinely be the new batch from the refill

anyone been through something like this on tirz specifically, what did you do and what actually helped. taking ginger and pepcid in the meantime and eating like a toddler (bland, small portions, frequent) which is taking me back to week 1 in a way thats annoying

First off, as a trader I gotta and genuinely love going back over my trades and events in hindsight so this topic I wanna dig into rn is interesting to me.

Second, to keep it objective, I'm not gonna throw in my own opinion just facts nothing more.

Genuinely curious how people who were around in 2020 think about this now.

honestly looking back at the whole "bitmex scam" framing from that era the real case was pretty specific. cftc went after them for running a derivatives platform without proper us registration and aml controls ended up settling for around $100m in 2021.

not great, obviously.

But what's kinda interesting from a few years out is how much that case ended up shaping the rest of the industry. kyc requirements that everyone takes for granted now on binance, bybit, okx got noticeably stricter in the years after. bitmex wasn't the only catalyst but the case definitely set the tone.

They implemented kyc, paid the fine, kept running. no withdrawal pause, no customer funds lost. which is more than you can say for half the exchanges that were operating in 2020 lol.

And if you compare that to the bybit 2025 case and their "North Korea" hack, how much do these incidents actually shift peoples opinions on the platform, do they even shift them at all?

thats what I'm curious about.

for anyone who was actually trading derivatives back then has your read on this changed with time, or you still feel the same way you did in 2020?

theres a quote about insanity being doing the same thing and expecting different results and i think about it a lot. should probably change some variable in my setup at this point. havent.

plan was simple. wait for the print, short eur/usd, take 15 pips, done. ran that play multiple times before, worked enough that i started thinking i had it figured out. classic.

go to open the position and the spread blows out for a full second. doesnt matter where you look. i usually have terminals open across all my brokers side by side (ic markets, pu prime, my ftmo challenge acct), keep notes and a stats sheet. all three painted the same picture. price ran me through the spread and into a stop before i could even react.

i get it, stops are part of the job, no broker is at fault here. but emotionally i was just done.

not a catastrophe in pure dollar terms. the real damage was the tilt after. spent the next hour trying to win it back on gold which obviously also lost. closed the day -$340 from a setup that on a quiet day wouldve been a routine 15 pip green.

execution wasnt the problem. no platform is gonna magically give you good fills during the worst 30 seconds of liquidity in the month. the problem was showing up at all.

gonna say it upfront yeah, I’m whining, but I’m genuinely exhausted. tired of constantly feeling like I’m leaving money on the table.

alright fellas im salty as hell. genuinely.

missed out on a stupid amount of money because of binance listing HYPE dead last. dead last. everyone else had it for months and binance just sat there.

ive always been a binance guy. trust, reputation, "top 1 exchange" all that stuff i kept telling myself. used it for years without thinking twice.

and im not some giga crypto veteran. literally use two things.

binance and my hot wallet.

part of my funds sit on the exchange for quick moves, rest just stays in the wallet. simple setup, worked for me, no complaints until now.

but the amount i didnt make from missing that early HYPE move actually got to me. ngl im still kinda fomo'd out about it. like genuinely lost sleep over the math of what that 10x would have been if i'd just had access when everyone else did.

so now im sitting here questioning the whole setup.

damn i just move to bybit. any options else? i hear people talk about it for early listings but honestly i wouldnt know what im looking at. i dont need fancy futures or copy trading or whatever else exchanges push on you. i literally just need a place where tokens show up before the move is already over.

anyone else go through this and switch? did it actually help or is it the same story on the next platform too

genuinely asking. tired of being the slowest guy in the chat watching everyone else print

filed crypto taxes for the first time as a "serious" trader this year, meaning i had positions across bybit, binance, a bit of spot on coinbase. spent way more time on this than on actually trading during the past 6 weeks. writing this for anyone in germany or similar jurisdictions who's about to go through the same.

the core problem nobody warns you about isn't the math.

it's that every exchange exports data in a slightly different format. each platform has its own column structure, its own way of showing trades vs conversions, its own approach to fees - by the time you have all of it you've got 4-5 different files that all describe trades slightly differently and your tax software has to reconcile them. defi adds another layer because you have to pull tx history from etherscan or similar block explorers manually.

what helped:

1. start the export process months before tax deadline. i didn't and ended up requesting historical csv from one platform that took 8 days to deliver.
2. transfer transactions between your own wallets/exchanges are not taxable but the software flags them as disposals if you don't manually mark them. spent an entire saturday going through 200+ transfers and tagging them. miss this and you're paying tax on money you literally just moved.
3. exchange csv quality varies a lot. some exchanges give you clean full-year exports with proper timestamps and pair info, others split things across multiple files or handle conversion vs trade differently which creates reconciliation work. expect to spend more time on whichever ones give you messier data.
4. germany's 1-year holding rule is your friend if you can structure trades around it. anything held over 12 months is tax-free for private investors. but for active trading on perps that doesn't really apply since those positions don't qualify for the holding period exemption.
5. cost basis methods matter. germany defaults to fifo but check what your specific situation requires. running scenarios through your software and picking the method that minimizes your bill is worth a couple hours.

i used koinly it worked but had to manually fix maybe 30 trades where matching went wrong. cointracker and zenledger are the other names that come up i don't have direct experience with either but both seem to be in similar pricing tiers.

bigger lesson if you trade across more than one exchange you basically need either a tracker tool from day one or you'll spend a week reconstructing your year retroactively.

if you're earlier in the year, set up the tracking now. future you will thank you.

First off, as a trader I gotta and genuinely love going back over my trades and events in hindsight so this topic I wanna dig into rn is interesting to me.

Second, to keep it objective, I'm not gonna throw in my own opinion just facts nothing more.

Genuinely curious how people who were around in 2020 think about this now.

honestly looking back at the whole "bitmex scam" framing from that era the real case was pretty specific. cftc went after them for running a derivatives platform without proper us registration and aml controls ended up settling for around $100m in 2021.

not great, obviously.

But what's kinda interesting from a few years out is how much that case ended up shaping the rest of the industry. kyc requirements that everyone takes for granted now on binance, bybit, okx got noticeably stricter in the years after. bitmex wasn't the only catalyst but the case definitely set the tone.

They implemented kyc, paid the fine, kept running. no withdrawal pause, no customer funds lost. which is more than you can say for half the exchanges that were operating in 2020 lol.

And if you compare that to the bybit 2025 case and their "North Korea" hack, how much do these incidents actually shift peoples opinions on the platform, do they even shift them at all?

thats what I'm curious about.

for anyone who was actually trading derivatives back then has your read on this changed with time, or you still feel the same way you did in 2020?

I like looking back and thinking through events that shaped the industry. Just to be clear, I’m not here to defend anyone just laying it out as cause -> effect.

Genuinely curious how people who were around in 2020 think about this now.

honestly looking back at the whole "bitmex scam" framing from that era the real case was pretty specific. cftc went after them for running a derivatives platform without proper us registration and aml controls ended up settling for around $100m in 2021.

not great, obviously.

but what's kinda interesting from a few years out is how much that case ended up shaping the rest of the industry. kyc requirements that everyone takes for granted now on binance, bybit, okx got noticeably stricter in the years after. bitmex wasn't the only catalyst but the case definitely set the tone.

they implemented kyc, paid the fine, kept running no withdrawal pause, no customer funds lost. which is more than you can say for half the exchanges that were operating in 2020 lol.

for anyone who was actually trading derivatives back then has your read on this changed with time or you still feel the same way you did in 2020?

And it's not a conspiracy, it's just that nobody checks the specs before they fund an account.

Short version is some exchanges mark your liq off the last traded price on their own orderbook. Others use a fair price / index pulled from spot across multiple venues. Sounds like a technical distinction but it's actually huge.

Last-traded means one big market sell can spike the price down 3% for a second, cascade-liq a bunch of people on that exchange, and recover before anyone blinks. Meanwhile the actual market didn't move. If you had leverage on you're just gone. This is what people mean when they complain about "wicks" - it's a real problem but it's a problem with the specific exchange's choice of marking method, not the market being rigged against you.

Fair price marking pulls an index from multiple spot exchanges and usually applies a moving average. A wick on one exchange alone can't touch you.

The wider market has to actually move for your position to close. Bitmex liquidation has been index-based for years (people forget this because they're thinking of 2018 drama), same with OKX on most perps. Bybit does it on majors but not all contracts, so you do have to check.

Smaller venues often use last-traded because it's cheaper to run.

So before putting leverage on anywhere new just find the contract specs page, search "mark price" or "index price," make sure it references a basket of spot exchanges and not just the venue itself. Takes 30 seconds, matters way more than any chart pattern you're going to read about.