Leave a balance or withdraw
Most people never decide this. They just do not withdraw, which is a decision made by default and the most expensive one on the site.
Withdraw whatever is left, each time
- What you gain
- Exposure ends when the order does. Nothing is sitting anywhere when something ordinary happens.
- What you give up
- A few minutes and a network fee per withdrawal.
- Suits
- Anyone who is not certain they will be back within a fortnight.
Leave a small remainder
- What you gain
- The next order starts immediately, and you skip the funding wait once.
- What you give up
- Small in amount and unbounded in duration, because remainders are exactly what people forget about.
- Suits
- Regular buyers, provided the remainder is genuinely small and there is a date by which it goes.
Leave whatever is there
- What you gain
- No effort at all.
- What you give up
- Everything that can happen to a platform, plus everything that can happen to your account, applied to a sum you have stopped thinking about.
- Suits
- Nobody deliberately. This is what happens when the decision is never made.
What can happen to it
| Event | How likely | Effect on a balance |
|---|---|---|
| Your account is lost | Far more likely than the platform failing | Gone with the account |
| Your attention lapses | Very likely over months | Nothing, until one of the others happens |
| An extended outage | Occasional | Not a loss, and a period where you cannot reach your own money |
| The platform ends | Unpredictable | Gone. Nobody predicts this and every market that ended looked healthy first. |
Why people leave one anyway
Three reasons, all understandable. Funding is the least pleasant step, so people do it once and generously to avoid repeating it. Fees make a single movement look cheaper. And a balance feels like it is somewhere rather than nowhere, which is a feeling about custody rather than a fact about it.
None of those survive contact with the arithmetic, and all three are about avoiding a small effort now in exchange for carrying a risk you will stop noticing.
What tips it
Whether you can name the date the balance leaves. If you can, a remainder is defensible. If the honest answer is that it stays until you next need it, then the amount is not a working balance, it is savings held by a stranger, and the decision has already been made for you by inertia.