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Home Brian McGrath Liquidation Cascade Prevention for Beginners (no Surprises)

Liquidation Cascade Prevention for Beginners (no Surprises)

Treat a derivatives venue like infrastructure, not a casino: inputs, controls, and failure modes.

Quick definition: Latency is a risk factor. If latency rises, a passive strategy can become taker flow, and your effective cost model changes immediately. Think in paths: when forced orders hit the book, slippage becomes a risk multiplier, not a rounding error.

Why it matters: 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 verify: Prefer smaller order slices before changing leverage. Size reductions often cut slippage more than a leverage tweak. Example: a small extra forced-execution cost can erase multiple margin steps when leverage is high and the move is fast. Run a small-size rehearsal when liquidity is thin. Observe how stop orders trigger and how mark/last prices diverge around spikes.

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

In Aivora notes, transparency beats cleverness when markets get loud. Derivatives are risky; test assumptions before you scale size.

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.
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