Who borrowed to bet, and which way

Bitfinex publishes its margin totals, long and short, pair by pair. Sizes are in coins, exactly as the exchange reports them.

89,668 BTC/USD · coins on margin · long against short · long on Oct-22 2026, the last day in this build, read from the venue's record, published by askthetape.com.

For everyone

Most exchanges keep borrowed positions private. Bitfinex publishes them: how many coins are held long on borrowed money and how many are held short, pair by pair, every hour. We show how many coins are held on each side and how those amounts changed. The exchange's own history reaches back to February 2021 without a missing day, and our own hourly poll of it started in June 2026: on 2026-10-22 — the last day with all 24 hours captured, and the only day this text quotes — we counted 89,668 BTC long against 173 BTC short on BTC/USD, about 518 to one.

For the pro

leg`bfx_margin_1h` — Bitfinex's own hourly margin statistics, back to 2021-02-22 as the exchange publishes them; we have polled them every hour since June 2026 — 69 pairs × long/short ever captured, 62 of them still carry a row on 2026-10-22 (some of those books have stood still for months); six pairs are shown here
cadencehourly, daily close
since2021-02-22 · 2,069 closed days with 0 missing, the running day apart
policysizes are in base coins, exactly as the exchange reports them — no dollar conversion, so no price assumption enters the number. The ratio is long ÷ short on the same day's closes. 🩸 read the ratio as a SHORT gauge, not a positioning gauge: on 2,069 closed BTC/USD days (the running day apart) the short side moves far more than the long one (sd of log short 1.074 against sd of log long 0.394, short ranging 98 … 25,310 coins), so long ÷ short is in practice 1 ÷ short. A record ratio is almost always a record-small short book, not a big long one — the two lines are drawn side by side above so you can see which one moved. · read on the site · not exported: this page is drawn from someone else's archive
🩸 a frozen paira row every day is not a quote every day: the exchange keeps publishing a pair after it has stopped trading, and the size then stands still. Measured on this build: 37 pair-sides carry a run of 30 days or more with a bit-identical size, 109 runs in all, the longest 285 days (XLMBTC short 285 days (2025-09-22…2026-07-03), APTUST short 152 days (2025-11-14…2026-04-14), AVAX:BTC long 148 days (2026-02-27…2026-07-24)). Still standing on 2026-10-22: BTCGBP short 139 days at 4.7e-05, DOGE:BTC short 31 days at 22. Nothing is deleted for it — a flat book is a fact about the pair — but the day counts in the badges count ROWS, and this line counts LIFE.
notethe 69 pairs we keep include XAUT (tokenised gold) and the EUR and GBP books; the page shows six, the leg holds all of them. 🩸 the count is measured each build, not asserted: 7 of them stopped quoting and are not «kept» in the present tense any more.
🩸 the running daythe text quotes the last day with 24 captured hours (2026-10-22), never the day in progress (2026-10-23). A part-day count moves between builds within the same hour and its long-to-short ratio is not the day's ratio.
hourly windowprod bfx_margin_1h, the exchange's own margin book (hourly print) · since 2021-02-22 17:00Z by data, 49,646 hours with data inside a 49,660-hour span → 2026-10-23 20:00Z (in the browser on Tape and Desk the 1h window draws the newest 400 days of that and the max window every hour) · captured 2026-10-23T21:21:56Z
this builddata to Oct-22 2026
policyno backfill · no export · read it here · read on the site · not exported: this page is drawn from someone else's archive

The chart itself is drawn in the browser: turn JavaScript on to hover a day, pick a window and draw your line. The numbers above come from the last build, Oct-23 2026 21:24Z.

What the tape says today · what's new · all 111 metrics

built 21:24Z
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