· four exchange APIs · rebuilt daily
Liquidation is arithmetic, not bad luck. Enter your position and see exactly where the exchange takes it — and whether your stop sits inside that distance.
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One figure rarely settles a position. These are the others.
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long : liq = entry x (1 - 1/leverage + maintenance_margin_rate) short : liq = entry x (1 + 1/leverage - maintenance_margin_rate)
At 10x with a 0.5% maintenance margin you are liquidated about 9.5% below entry. At 25x, about 3.5%. At 50x, about 1.5% — which is inside the ordinary hourly range of most large caps, meaning a 50x position is a coin flip against noise regardless of whether your thesis is right.
No, and this is the part that makes a calculator disagree with an exchange. Venues set the rate in tiers against position notional: a small position sits in the lowest tier, and the rate steps up as the position grows. Two traders at the same leverage on the same contract can have different liquidation prices because one of them is in a higher tier. The tier table is on the venue, under the contract's risk-limit or margin page, and it is worth reading once.
Three ordinary reasons, none of them a fault in the arithmetic. On cross margin the whole balance backs the position, so unrealised profit and loss on everything else moves the number continuously. Unpaid funding is deducted from margin, so a position held through several settlements drifts toward liquidation without the price moving. And the closing fee is taken into account by some venues and not others. Treat the exchange's figure as the authority and this one as the shape of it.
Only if it sits inside the liquidation distance, and only if it fills. A stop placed further from entry than the liquidation price is decoration: the exchange closes the position first, at a worse price and with a fee attached. The calculator marks this because it is the single most common way a position is lost by someone who thought they had a plan.
It is the fraction of position value the venue insists stays as collateral. Fall below it and the position is closed. It is why liquidation happens slightly before your margin reaches zero: the venue is protecting itself against the gap between deciding to close and being filled.
The distance is close but not symmetric. A long is liquidated below entry and a short above it, and because the maintenance margin is added on one side and subtracted on the other, a short's liquidation sits marginally further from entry at the same leverage. At high leverage the difference is small enough to ignore; at low leverage it is smaller still.
On isolated margin, the margin assigned to that position is gone and the rest of the account is untouched. On cross margin the whole balance was the margin, so a liquidation can take far more than the position appeared to risk. That difference is the entire reason to choose one over the other.