Know where the exchange takes the position away from you before you open it. Enter your entry, leverage and side — the calculator shows the estimated liquidation price and, more importantly, how little the market has to move to reach it.
For isolated margin: a long is liquidated when losses consume the initial margin down to the maintenance requirement, approximately entry × (1 − 1/leverage + MMR). A short mirrors it: entry × (1 + 1/leverage − MMR). At 10× that's roughly a 9.5% adverse move; at 50× it's under 2%.
Real exchanges apply tiered maintenance margins that grow with position size, plus fees — so actual liquidation lands slightly closer to entry than this estimate. Treat the output as the optimistic bound, not a promise.
Exchanges use tiered maintenance margin (bigger positions require a higher percentage), deduct fees from margin, and mark positions on a composite index price rather than the last trade. All three push the real liquidation price toward entry. This calculator gives the standard isolated-margin approximation — check your exchange's own preview for the binding number.
Far enough that ordinary volatility can't reach it. Major crypto pairs routinely move 3–5% within a day; if liquidation sits inside that band, the position can be ended by noise regardless of whether the idea was right. A useful discipline: your stop-loss should always trigger well before liquidation — if liquidation is the stop, the size is wrong.
Yes, mechanically: liquidation distance is roughly 1/leverage minus the maintenance margin. 100× leverage puts liquidation well under 1% from entry — inside the bid-ask bounce of a normal minute. In our own 1,000-path simulation on real trades, maximum leverage produced eventual blowup with certainty even when the underlying strategy was profitable.
Surviving the position is step one. Whether the entry behind it has any edge is step zero — most graded strategies fail it.
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