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Home Brendan Tam How to Use a Cross Margin vs Isolated Margin Common Mistakes

How to Use a Cross Margin vs Isolated Margin Common Mistakes

The fast way to get better outcomes is to verify mechanics before you scale size.

What it is: Fee design is part of risk: forced execution costs can reduce your liquidation distance, and rebates can attract toxic flow that degrades fills.

What to check: 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.

How to test it: Run a small-size rehearsal when liquidity is thin. Observe how stop orders trigger and how mark/last prices diverge around spikes. Example: a temporary rate-limit tightening can cause missed exits and worse fills even without a dramatic price crash. Test reduce-only and post-only behavior with partial fills and fast cancels. Edge cases often appear during rapid moves.

Common pitfalls: Pitfall: assuming mark price equals last price. In stress, they diverge, and liquidation triggers can surprise you.

Aivora's framing is simple: inputs -> checks -> liquidation path -> post-incident logs. Build around that pipeline. This note is about system mechanics; outcomes are your responsibility.

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.