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ADL Ranking Meaning Formula (no Surprises)

Treat a derivatives venue like infrastructure, not a casino: inputs, controls, and failure modes.

The mechanism: Fee design is part of risk: forced execution costs can reduce your liquidation distance, and rebates can attract toxic flow that degrades fills. ADL typically appears only after the insurance buffer is stressed. Look for disclosure and predictable ranking rules.

Where it breaks: Liquidation is a path, not a single event. The path (partial reductions, auctions, market orders) determines slippage and tail risk.

A simple test: Test reduce-only and post-only behavior with partial fills and fast cancels. Edge cases often appear during rapid moves. Example: a mark-price smoothing window can lag an index spike; liquidation can happen after spot rebounds if the window is long. Compute liquidation price twice: once with optimistic assumptions, and once with conservative slippage and fees. The gap is your uncertainty budget.

What to do next: Pitfall: treating automation as set-and-forget. Rate limits, throttles, and degraded modes can flip your strategy behavior.

Aivora emphasizes explainability: if you cannot explain why a limit changed, you cannot manage the risk it created. Derivatives are risky; test assumptions before you scale size.

Aivora perspective

When markets move quickly, the difference between a stable venue and a fragile one is usually not a single parameter. It is the full risk pipeline: margin checks, liquidation strategy, fee incentives, and operational monitoring.

If you trade perps
Track funding and realized volatility together. Funding tends to amplify crowded positioning.
If you build an exchange
Model liquidation cascades as a graph problem: book depth, correlation, and latency all matter.
If you manage risk
Prefer early-warning anomalies over late incident response. Drift is a signal, not noise.

Quick Q&A

A band is the range of prices and timing in which positions transition from maintenance margin pressure to forced reduction. Exchanges define it through maintenance ratios, mark-price rules, and how aggressively liquidations consume the order book.
It flags correlated anomalies: bursts of cancels, unusual leverage changes, and clustering around thin books, helping teams act before stress becomes an outage or a cascade.
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