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Home Samuel Baker Mark Price vs Last Price What to Verify and What Traders Miss

Mark Price vs Last Price What to Verify and What Traders Miss

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

Concept first: Liquidation is a path, not a single event. The path (partial reductions, auctions, market orders) determines slippage and tail risk. If you see unexplained liquidations, compare index updates to mark sampling and check whether outlier filters are documented.

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

Checklist: 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. Track funding together with basis and realized volatility. The combination is a better crowding signal than any single metric.

Final sanity check: Pitfall: ignoring fees and funding in liquidation math. The platform can close you earlier than your stop-loss plan expects.

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.