Long

Going long means taking a position that profits when the price rises: you buy an asset (or a derivative tracking it) expecting to sell later at a higher price. It is the most intuitive direction of trading — buy low, sell high — and simply holding a coin in a wallet is effectively an unleveraged long.

For example, a trader who goes long 1 ETH at $3,000 and sells at $3,300 earns $300 before fees, a 10% gain. On a futures exchange, the same view could be expressed with a leveraged long: 5x leverage would turn that 10% price move into roughly a 50% gain on the margin posted — and an equally magnified loss if the price falls instead.

The word comes from traditional finance, where being "long" an asset means owning it or benefiting from its appreciation. Spot longs have a hard floor on losses — the asset can only go to zero — whereas leveraged longs can be liquidated well before that. A common misconception is that "long" implies a long time horizon; it refers only to the direction of the bet, and a long trade can last seconds.