Discretionary traders should think carefully about instrument selection As in spot vs spot margin vs perps vs options and combinations therein The obvious components are cost, liquidity, and capital efficiency. The non-obvious components are drawdown tolerance, volatility tolerance, and trade management. From personal experience: Perps are excellent for intraday trading, but for swing trading and larger bets my performance was worse because I would over-manage those positions and be much more sensitive to drawdowns etc. Spot/spot margin are great for larger bets and higher time frame swing trades. I'd find myself less concerned with the tick-by-tick movements so I could actually hold the trade, but whenever I've tried to LTF trade those instruments, I would get complacent with trade management. The tempting default answer is perps for liquidity + to size up, but your bigger position isn't helpful if it means you sabotage yourself by managing it poorly I'm certain that you can think of trades that were great ideas but poorly executed - instrument selection may be the culprit