How to trade with leverage

Eight lessons, in order. Start with what a multiplier does to a position and finish knowing what closes it, what it costs to hold, and how much of your account is on the line.

Stage one: what the multiplier does

Four short lessons on the mechanics, each written against the live figures on the 45 markets tracked here rather than in the abstract.

• 1

  How leverage works

  A multiplier sets how far the price can travel against you before the venue closes the position. Read that first and the rest follows.

• 2

  Going long or going short

  A short pays funding and crosses a spread that a long never sees. Work out whether the direction is worth its extra cost before you take it.

• 3

  What liquidation is

  The price at which the venue closes you because the wager is spent, and the arithmetic that decides where it sits.

• 4

  What 1000× really means

  Every venue will sell you 1000×. The live figures show how long it tends to last on each market before it goes.

Stage two: the arithmetic that settles the trade

Four derivations. Every figure is computed from the rules the venues publish, and where a venue publishes nothing the gap is named instead of filled.

• 5

  Sizing the position

  Turn a $100.00 wager into exposure, and see why a fee charged on the wager behaves nothing like one charged on the notional.

• 6

  Where the liquidation price sits

  1.00% away at 100×, derived from each venue's published maintenance rules rather than quoted from a help page.

• 7

  What it costs to hold

  One venue publishes an hourly rate capped at 4.00%. The other charges every 8 hours and publishes no rate, so every cost figure here is a floor.

• 8

  What the rest of your account is exposed to

  Isolated margin, cross margin, and which of the two venues can take more than the $100.00 you wagered.

Stage three: put it to work

The lessons are only worth the time if you use them on a real position.

• →

  Work out your own numbers

  Put a wager and a multiplier in and read the distance to liquidation, the opening cost and the breakeven move.

• →

  Pick a market and size a position

  The highest leverage level that survived on each of the 45 markets, with a simulator on every page.

• →

  Choose a leverage level for your hold

  Over one session the most common surviving level is 20×, agreeing on 26 of 46 markets, and a longer hold brings that level down.

One thing the lessons cannot tell you

Cost of carry is not comparable across the two venues. Hourly funding on the notional-basis venue is market-set, capped at 4.00% an hour and paid peer to peer, with an interest component of 0.01% per 8 hours that compounds to 11.6% a year. The wager-basis venue charges a rolling fee every 8 hours at a rate it does not publish, so venues.carry_comparable() returns False and every cost figure here is scoped to entry. A performance fee on realised profit and a spread inside the settlement price are reported only by third-party testers, so they appear in no arithmetic here either.

Registry 2026-08-28a, reviewed through 2026-11-28. Rebuilt 2026-08-28 01:19 UTC UTC. Maintenance and liquidation rules: Hyperliquid liquidations, Moon on how leverage works.

Figures on this page were rebuilt 2026-08-28 by the MarketMoves editorial desk, from the sources named in the methodology. Nothing here is a forecast, and none of it is advice.