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Home Scott Lam Mark Price Calculation Field Notes (no Surprises)

Mark Price Calculation Field Notes (no Surprises)

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

What it is: Liquidation is a path, not a single event. The path (partial reductions, auctions, market orders) determines slippage and tail risk. If you see unexplained liquidations, compare index updates to mark sampling and check whether outlier filters are documented.

What to check: Latency is a risk factor. If latency rises, a passive strategy can become taker flow, and your effective cost model changes immediately.

How to test it: Track funding together with basis and realized volatility. The combination is a better crowding signal than any single metric. Example: a temporary rate-limit tightening can cause missed exits and worse fills even without a dramatic price crash. Compute liquidation price twice: once with optimistic assumptions, and once with conservative slippage and fees. The gap is your uncertainty budget.

Common pitfalls: Pitfall: ignoring fees and funding in liquidation math. The platform can close you earlier than your stop-loss plan expects.

Aivora focuses on operational discipline: clean data, stable rules, and clear incident playbooks matter more than hype. Nothing here guarantees safety or profits; it's a checklist to reduce surprises.

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.