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Home Neil Thornton Mark Price vs Last Price How to for AI Contract Trading Exchange

Mark Price vs Last Price How to for AI Contract Trading Exchange

Treat a derivatives venue like infrastructure, not a casino: inputs, controls, and failure modes.

Concept first: Fee design is part of risk: forced execution costs can reduce your liquidation distance, and rebates can attract toxic flow that degrades fills. If you see unexplained liquidations, compare index updates to mark sampling and check whether outlier filters are documented.

Edge cases: An AI risk layer should be explainable: it can rank anomalies, but deterministic guardrails must remain stable and auditable.

Checklist: Track funding together with basis and realized volatility. The combination is a better crowding signal than any single metric. Example: small funding transfers compound; over several cycles they can materially shift equity and your maintenance buffer. Prefer smaller order slices before changing leverage. Size reductions often cut slippage more than a leverage tweak.

Final sanity check: Pitfall: overusing cross margin without correlation thinking. Portfolio coupling can turn a hedge into a trigger.

In Aivora notes, transparency beats cleverness when markets get loud. This is educational content about mechanics, not financial advice.

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.