Liquidation

Liquidation is a forced mechanism in leveraged trading. When you open a leveraged position with margin and price moves against you, your unrealized loss keeps eating into that margin; once it falls below a threshold (the maintenance margin), the exchange — to avoid you owing it money — closes your position at market. The price that triggers this is the liquidation price. After liquidation, the margin you put in is almost entirely gone and that position is over.

Leverage lets you control a large position with little money, but that's a risk for the exchange — if price crashes and your loss exceeds your margin, in theory you'd owe the exchange money and it would eat the bad debt. To prevent this, exchanges built liquidation: before your loss exceeds your margin, they close the position, capping the loss within the margin you already put in. So liquidation is essentially the exchange's risk-control line, protecting the solvency of the exchange and other users, not your capital.

Once you understand liquidation, the first thing to calculate before any order is where your liquidation price sits. The higher the leverage, the closer it is to your entry — 10x liquidates at roughly a 9% drop, 20x at about 4.5%, 50x needs only a 1.8% adverse move to wipe you out. Crypto routinely wicks 5-10% in a candle, so high leverage hands your fate to random volatility. Second, liquidation is irreversible: even if the market later goes exactly your way, you're no longer in it. So real pros control not direction but how long they can survive before being shaken out.

First, always confirm the liquidation price on the order page and ask: could the market touch this price before I'm proven right? Second, trade lower leverage to buy survival room — beginners should stay within 2-3x; for a given exposure, use more margin at low leverage rather than little margin at high leverage. Third, set a stop-loss and exit ahead of the liquidation price, keeping the decision in your hands rather than the liquidation engine's. Fourth, avoid heavy positions right before major data or events, when wicks happen most. Remember: the only good leverage is the leverage that keeps you alive to see the move.