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Home Felix Grant Mark Price Calculation Common Mistakes and What Traders Miss

Mark Price Calculation Common Mistakes and What Traders Miss

A lot of losses come from tiny assumptions: which price triggers liquidation, when funding hits, and how fees are applied.

The mechanism: Look for the platform's fallback rules: what happens if a feed is stale, if the book is thin, or if volatility spikes faster than normal sampling windows. If you see unexplained liquidations, compare index updates to mark sampling and check whether outlier filters are documented.

Where it breaks: Latency is a risk factor. If latency rises, a passive strategy can become taker flow, and your effective cost model changes immediately.

A simple test: Treat cross margin as a correlated portfolio. Correlations converge during stress, so diversification can vanish when you need it most. Example: a temporary rate-limit tightening can cause missed exits and worse fills even without a dramatic price crash. If you automate, use scoped API keys, IP allow-lists, and exponential backoff. Limits often tighten exactly when volatility rises.

What to do next: Pitfall: assuming mark price equals last price. In stress, they diverge, and liquidation triggers can surprise you.

Aivora focuses on operational discipline: clean data, stable rules, and clear incident playbooks matter more than hype. This is educational content about mechanics, not financial advice.

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.
No. This site is educational and system-focused. You are responsible for decisions and risk management.