Perpetual futures for beginners - how not to get liquidated in week one

LI

liq_calc

Author

Original post

Hey everyone. Most of you have heard of futures and know they are the fastest way to grow or destroy a crypto balance. For anyone who has just started, is thinking about starting, or will look at futures some day, here are a few things that keep you from being liquidated immediately.

NOTE: do not go near futures or margin until you know what they are, how they work and what they can cost you. A beginner has no business in futures at all. It is probably the most dangerous instrument in crypto, it takes a great deal of practice, and even then nothing is guaranteed.

1.) This one is my opinion, but after years of trading: never run 50x to 100x. Crypto moves enough on a short timeframe that those swings alone will take you out. It is a trap.

2.) Market orders fill instantly at whatever the market is, which is only useful if you genuinely do not mind giving up a percent or more. Use limit orders almost all of the time so your entry lands where you chose. Your entry price is part of your result, not a detail.

3.) Do not put the whole position into one order. Splitting it pushes your liquidation price further away when things get volatile. For example:

Somebody wants $100 long on Bitcoin but is not sure the price will not dip further. Instead of one order for $100 they place $50 at 25000, $25 at 24500 and $25 at 24000. Liquidation moves from around 23000 to around 22500 - and if price bounces after the orders fill, they are better off there too.

4.) Always set a stop. It is the difference between losing part of a position and losing all of it. Losing 75% beats losing 100%. This matters most while you are asleep and the price does something unexpected. A take profit is nice to have for sudden spikes, but it is not the necessity a stop is.

5.) Run the numbers through a liquidation calculator before you send the order, so you can see what each leverage setting actually costs you. It has saved me repeatedly. A 2x long on Bitcoin, for example, is very unlikely to liquidate - the price would have to fall to something like 13,000 - and since I believe in Bitcoin over the long run, that 2x is useful to me.

6.) Do not forget the small ongoing costs: maker/taker fees, plus funding on an open position every eight to twenty-four hours depending on the venue. Read your exchange's fee page.

IMPORTANT

I am not encouraging anybody to trade futures. You can lose everything, and for most people it is closer to gambling than to investing. But these are the things I wish somebody had told me when I started with futures and margin, and maybe they help you. Apologies for any spelling mistakes.

Jul 30, 2026

SP

spot_only

Member

Leverage and I are not friends. I never touch it. Crypto moves enough on spot as it is.

Jul 30, 2026

BE

been_burned

Member

That is gambling, plain and simple. The real danger is the addiction. You can be right ten times in a row and then make one emotional decision that erases all of it. I won plenty of times and still ended up losing the lot. Throw a few dollars at it for fun if you are bored, but it is not a way to make money over time. Just buy and hold.

Jul 30, 2026

CT

ChainRated Team

Member

Point 1 is the one we can put numbers against, because we archive what signal channels actually ask their subscribers to do.

Of 10,678 signals in our index, 9,546 state a leverage figure. The median is 10x and so is the most common value by a wide margin. 412 signals — about 4% of the ones that state a figure — ask for 50x or more, and they come from 11 of the 28 channels that publish a figure at all. So the 50-100x you are warning about is real but rarer than its reputation; the everyday product being sold is 10x.

The more interesting part is what happens to those calls. We replay every signal with no leverage and equal size on each trade, so what comes out measures the call itself, not the sizing. Grouped by the leverage the channel asked for:

10x or less: 76.2% reached a 2% move in the called direction before the stop (2,651 scored signals)
11-20x: 68.5% (1,021)
21-49x: 65.9% (1,353)
50x and above: 68.8% (330)

Everything sits in a band between roughly two thirds and three quarters, and the differences track which channels tend to post at which leverage rather than leverage itself. One caveat on the top row so nobody quotes it as a finding: that bucket is dominated by a single very high-output channel, and 55% of the signals in it never filled at all.

Which is the whole argument for your rule, stated from the data side. Leverage does not change whether the call was right. It changes whether your account is still open at the moment the answer arrives. At 25x, ordinary noise on a normal day reaches the liquidation price before the idea has had a chance to be right or wrong, and the call that eventually worked is no comfort to a position that was closed on Tuesday.

Full breakdown, including which channels never state a figure at all: what leverage do signal channels actually ask for.

Sep 17, 2026