90 days of real wicks: how often each leverage level actually got liquidated

Here's the experiment. Take the last 90 daily candles on BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, BNB and DOGE. For each day, measure the dip from the day's open to the day's low — the wick a long opened at that morning's price had to survive. Then ask a simple question: at each leverage level, on how many of those 90 days would that long have been liquidated by the wick alone?

No strategy, no stop-losses, no timing skill — just the raw frequency at which the market reaches each liquidation distance. Liquidation distances used: 100x ≈ 0.5% from entry, 50x ≈ 1.5%, 25x ≈ 3.5%, 10x ≈ 9.5% (standard isolated margin with 0.5% maintenance).

The table

Days (out of 90) on which the open→low dip reached the liquidation distance for a long opened at that day's open. Computed 11 July 2026 from Binance spot daily candles.

What the numbers say, plainly

100x is not a trade, it's a coin flip that repeats until you lose. On Bitcoin — the calmest coin on the list — a 100x long opened at the day's open got wicked into liquidation on 66 of 90 days. That's 73% of days. On ETH it's 84%. You don't need to be wrong about direction; the ordinary daily wiggle is 1.3–2% (median), and your liquidation sits at 0.5%.

50x loses to a normal day about half the time. DOGE reached the 1.5% liquidation distance on 53 of 90 days, ETH and XRP on 49. Even BTC — 41 of 90. Flip a coin every single day; tails, your margin is gone. And this period was not a crash — it was three months of fairly ordinary market.

25x is where the odds start to look like odds. BTC and BNB reached the 3.5% distance about once per 10 days; SOL and DOGE roughly once per 4. Survivable — if your entries are better than random and you don't hold through events. But "once every four days" is still a lot of ways to die in a month of holding.

10x survived the entire quarter almost everywhere. Zero liquidation days on BTC, XRP and BNB; one on ETH; two on SOL and DOGE. This is the empirical version of what the max leverage calculator tells you from theory: single-digit-to-low-teens leverage is where a position can actually be wrong for a day and still exist.

The two caveats that make it worse

First, this counts only the day-open entry. Enter mid-rally at a local top and your effective wick exposure is worse than the table shows. Second, these are daily candles — intraday wicks between the opens are invisible here. The real liquidation frequency at each level is higher than measured, not lower. Treat the table as the optimistic floor.

What to do with this

The next time a 50x position feels reasonable because "it's just a quick scalp": on the coins above, the market reached 50x liquidation distance roughly every second day this quarter, with no news required. Check where your liquidation actually sits with the liquidation calculator, size the position from your stop with the position size calculator, and see today's live wick data on the live market risk read — we now compute the "worst 7-day dip" and the survivable leverage for each major, updated on every page load.