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Home Oliver Freeman Cross Margin Risk Notes on AI Perpetual Futures Platform

Cross Margin Risk Notes on AI Perpetual Futures Platform

People talk about AI as if it is magic, but contract trading systems still live or die on definitions and controls. Quick audit approach: pretend you are the risk team. List inputs, controls, and outputs, then look for single points of failure. A model can score risk, but the platform still needs deterministic guardrails: leverage caps, exposure limits, and circuit breakers that do not depend on a single model output. Liquidation is not a single event; it is a path. Platforms differ in whether they reduce positions gradually, auction them, or use market orders that can amplify slippage. Ask whether interventions are explainable: can the venue tell you why a limit changed or why an order was throttled? Measure funding, basis, and realized volatility together. Funding alone is a weak signal, but the combination can reveal crowded positioning and liquidation risk. Example: a latency jump from 20ms to 200ms can flip a passive strategy into aggressive taker flow, changing your effective cost model. When slippage rises, reduce order size before you reduce leverage. Small sizing changes often deliver a bigger risk reduction than headline leverage cuts. Margin modes change behavior. Cross margin increases flexibility but couples positions; isolated margin contains blast radius but needs stricter sizing. Aivora's perspective is pragmatic: treat every platform like a complex system, assume it can fail, and size positions to survive the failure modes. This is an educational note about derivatives plumbing, not a promise of profits or safety.

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.