methodology

the simulator, and the side of the spread it uses

Exposure is stake multiplied by leverage. A long makes exposure × ((current − entry) ÷ entry). A short makes exposure × ((entry − current) ÷ entry).

The side of the book matters more than that formula suggests. A long opens at the ask and closes at the bid. A short opens at the bid and closes at the ask. Using the last traded price for both ends would quietly delete the spread and make every result better than a real trade. That convention is implemented. It currently has no effect, because Moon does not publish a spread and this site will not invent one, so the two sides of the quote coincide at the mid. If Moon documents a spread the convention applies it without any other change. Third-party testers report that Moon's settlement price does contain a house spread, which would make real results worse than the figures here.

Cost is modelled as Moon documents it and no further. The opening fee is 1% of the wager. Moon's glossary is explicit that it is "calculated solely on your wager amount" and "not calculated on your total leveraged exposure", so the fee does not scale with the multiplier and is the same 1% at 1000× as at 2×. An earlier version of this site modelled a round trip charged on exposure instead, which overstated the cost of opening a 1000× wager by about a factor of 160. That was wrong and every derived figure has been rebuilt.

Two documented costs are stated but never multiplied out. A rolling fee is charged every 8 hours at a rate Moon calls dynamic and does not publish. Two further costs are reported by third-party testers but are not in Moon's own documentation, and so appear nowhere in these calculations: a performance fee on realised profit, and the house spread above. Every figure on this site is therefore a floor on cost, not an estimate of it.

Maintenance margin is 0 basis points, because Moon documents no buffer. A wager is closed once it has lost the wager, so the max loss price sits at exactly one part in the leverage: 1% away at 100×, 0.1% at 1000×. Loss stops there. Moon states that an account balance "can never go below zero as a result of a bet".

Indicative example based on third-party market data. Moon's reference price, spread, fees, settlement and liquidation rules may produce a different result.

the replay ladder

The ladder takes a fixed $100 stake at each rung of 2x, 5x, 10x, 20x, 50x, 100x, 1000x and runs it through the last 12 hours of one-minute bars for that instrument, long and short. A rung is liquidated the first minute the adverse excursion from entry exceeds the distance its own leverage allows, after maintenance margin. Liquidation is checked against the low for a long and the high for a short, not the close, because a position does not survive a wick by being marked at the end of the minute. Once a rung is liquidated it stays dead. There is no re-entry.

Where minute coverage over the window is thin, the page says so and gives the coverage percentage rather than quietly reporting a curve built from gaps.

volatility and range statistics

Realised volatility is the standard deviation of daily log returns over the stated session count, annualised by the square root of 252 for equities and 365 for crypto and metals. Average true range is the Wilder 14-session figure expressed as a percentage of price. Every figure carries its window, because a percentage without a window is a rumour.

derived daily bars

Where a daily bar is rebuilt from minute bars rather than supplied by the vendor, it is labelled as derived. A rebuilt bar and a vendor print are not the same object and the site does not present them as one.

the catalyst window

A move qualifies as material when it clears the larger of 1.4 times that instrument's own daily standard deviation, 1.5% across the replay window, or 2.5% on the session. The threshold is per instrument on purpose: 2% is a quiet day in one name and an event in another. Sources are searched back 36 hours. Opinion mills, price-target aggregators and press-release wires are excluded from the candidate pool by name. Form 4 and 13F filings are excluded as noise.

Moon availability

An instrument-level Moon link appears only where a person has confirmed the instrument is listed on Moon, and that confirmation expires after 30 days. There is no automated check, because reading Moon's internal endpoints to build a coverage list is not something we do. An unverified instrument shows the reason there is no link instead of a link.

commercial assumptions, and their status

Fees, the leverage ladder and the referral terms live in a dated configuration record, currently version 2026-08-26b. Nothing in it has been verified against a live Moon account, so it is modelling input rather than a quoted term, and the site labels it that way. See data sources for the limits on the price feed itself.