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Home Ciaran McKenna Auto Deleveraging ADL Explained Checklist and What Traders Miss

Auto Deleveraging ADL Explained Checklist and What Traders Miss

Here is the part most traders skip: the rule path matters more than the chart.

The mechanism: Latency is a risk factor. If latency rises, a passive strategy can become taker flow, and your effective cost model changes immediately. ADL typically appears only after the insurance buffer is stressed. Look for disclosure and predictable ranking rules.

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: a mark-price smoothing window can lag an index spike; liquidation can happen after spot rebounds if the window is long. Run a small-size rehearsal when liquidity is thin. Observe how stop orders trigger and how mark/last prices diverge around spikes.

What to do next: Pitfall: trusting a single data source. One stale oracle feed can distort index and mark calculations if fallbacks are weak.

Aivora focuses on operational discipline: clean data, stable rules, and clear incident playbooks matter more than hype. This note is about system mechanics; outcomes are your responsibility.

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.