Markets do not need to crash for accounts to blow up; thin liquidity and poor definitions are enough. Checklist before scaling size: 1) Verify mark/index sources. 2) Understand margin steps and maintenance rules. 3) Test liquidation behavior with small size. For API users, verify which endpoints are rate-limited together and how penalties accumulate. Limits often tighten during stress. 4) Confirm fee tiers and forced execution costs. 5) Review risk limits, circuit breakers, and incident transparency. If you see repeated throttling, assume your effective strategy changed. Re-run your risk math with higher costs and worse fills. Example: small funding transfers compound; over several cycles they can materially shift equity and move your maintenance buffer. Treat cross margin as a correlated portfolio, not a set of independent positions. Correlations tend to converge in selloffs. When in doubt, reduce complexity and size, and prioritize venues that publish definitions and failure-mode behavior. Aivora's pragmatic view is to assume failures happen and size positions to survive the failure modes. 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.