A perpetuals desk is only useful if it can take the position away from you. This one liquidates against an index mark price, charges funding every interval, and shows you why it happened.
| Mechanic | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Mark price | An index mark rather than the last trade on a single book — the same reason a real venue liquidates you on a price your chart may not have printed |
| Margin | Initial margin 1 ÷ leverage, with a maintenance requirement below it; the gap is your entire room to be wrong |
| Funding | Charged per interval for as long as the position is open, with the annualised cost shown — not a footnote at close |
| Leverage | Capped at 25× in the advanced mode, deliberately. The cap is a product decision, not a technical limit |
| Book depth | Advanced perp book depth is widened so large orders meet realistic resistance rather than an infinite counterparty |
When a position is liquidated the desk explains the sequence: where margin stood, what funding had already removed, which mark price crossed the line. "You were liquidated" teaches nothing. "Funding had taken 0.9% of margin, the index crossed your maintenance level at 09:42, and your stop sat outside it" teaches the whole lesson.
The liquidation price calculator shows the survivable move for any leverage — at 25× with 0.5% maintenance it is about 3.5%, which is an ordinary afternoon for most crypto assets. The funding calculator converts a 0.03% interval rate into the 32% a year it actually is.
Sustained positive funding means the crowd is long and paying to stay there. Read as carry it is a drag; read as a crowding gauge it is one of the few live measures of consensus in the market. Extremes in it have preceded most violent unwinds, because the cost of holding the popular trade eventually exceeds the conviction behind it — and when those positions close, they close as market orders into whatever depth remains.
A liquidation is not a quiet accounting event. It is an aggressive market order that adds to the move that caused it, which is why clusters of them at obvious levels produce the spike-through-then-reverse pattern that looks like manipulation and is mostly arithmetic. Practising on a desk that models this is how the pattern stops being mysterious: put the stop where the idea is wrong, and keep it well inside the level where the venue would act for you.
Isolated margin caps the damage at the collateral assigned to that position; cross margin backs every position with the whole account and liquidates the set together. Crypto positions correlate hard in stress, so a cross-margin book of several altcoin longs is one leveraged bet with extra tickers. Practise in isolated until that is obvious.
Yes — the perps desk trades paper margin on live data, with funding, maintenance margin and index-mark liquidation all modelled.
Because liquidation is assessed against an index mark price built from several markets, exactly as real venues do it.
25× in advanced mode. The cap is deliberate — beyond it the position is a countdown rather than a trade.
Open the desk — free, no account — no account, nothing to install