Aivora AI-native exchange insights
Home Eoin Murphy How to Use a Cross Margin vs Isolated Margin for Beginners

How to Use a Cross Margin vs Isolated Margin for Beginners

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

The mechanism: Funding is a transfer between traders, but timing, rounding, and caps can change equity at the worst moment. Verify schedule and limits.

Where it breaks: Write down the exact references used: index price, mark price, and last price. Then confirm which reference drives margin checks and liquidation triggers.

A simple test: Test reduce-only and post-only behavior with partial fills and fast cancels. Edge cases often appear during rapid moves. Example: small funding transfers compound; over several cycles they can materially shift equity and your maintenance buffer. Compute liquidation price twice: once with optimistic assumptions, and once with conservative slippage and fees. The gap is your uncertainty budget.

What to do next: 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. Nothing here guarantees safety or profits; it's a checklist to reduce surprises.

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.