I just learned how to effectively check the long-short ratio and want to share it with everyone because it’s really useful when trading.

The simplest way is to use Coinglass. Just go to this website, find the long-short ratio tab, type in the coin name (BTC, ETH, SOL...) and you’ll see the ratio across different exchanges immediately. The cool thing is it also distinguishes between individual investors and institutions, so you can assess which side the market is leaning towards.

If you’re trading on a major exchange, you can also directly check their futures contract data. Just visit the futures page of the coin you’re interested in, click on the data section, then look for the long-short ratio. It will display both by account and by trading volume.

Additionally, TradingView has some handy tools like Hyblock Capital or Laevitas. These tools allow you to see open interest (how many contracts are open) and funding rate (which indicates whether longs or shorts are paying more to hold their positions).

Reading the long-short ratio is also straightforward. When the ratio is greater than 1, it means more people are long – the market is rising but there’s also a risk of a long squeeze. Conversely, when the ratio is less than 1, more people are short, which could lead to a short squeeze.

Things to watch out for: if open interest is high along with an extremely skewed long-short ratio, you should be cautious because big volatility could come to hunt for liquidated positions. A very high funding rate is also a warning sign – if too many longs are open, a correction might happen.

In fact, monitoring this long-short ratio helps me avoid many traps. It’s not a guaranteed winning formula, but at least it gives me a clearer view of market sentiment.