I originally thought about doing some simple hedging arbitrage—opening a short position in spot, going long in futures, locking both sides and just waiting to collect the funding fee. In theory, the profits should be enough for me to go downstairs and buy a serving of Longjiang pork knuckle rice, no problem, right?

But reality gave me a hard slap in the face. Opportunities for guaranteed profits like this are basically out of reach for retail investors. Those quant bots are watching the market more sharply than you ever could—their algorithms spot price differences in a flash, and they run 24/7 without sleeping or blinking. By the time you even react and get ready to place an order, the bots have already squeezed every bit of arbitrage out of it.

Sometimes it really feels like us manual traders are just here for the show. Programmatic trading is so efficient it’s almost hopeless. Take HEMI for example—whenever there’s even a slight funding rate discrepancy, before you can even figure out how to operate, the bots have already completed three rounds of in-and-out trades.

Sigh, if you want to make a living with strategies like this, it looks like you need to learn how to code first.