Rekt Report: the exact move that liquidates you at 10x, 25x, 50x and 100x

We've covered how fees grind down scalpers and how funding bleeds held positions. Those are slow leaks. Liquidation is the instant kill — and unlike fees, it's a single, knowable number you can work out before you click "buy." So let's do the one piece of arithmetic that should sit at the front of every leveraged trade: how far does price have to move against me before I'm gone?

The formula, stripped to the bone

Ignore the exchange's scary-looking liquidation-price formula for a second. The intuition is dead simple. Your margin is the buffer that absorbs losses. Leverage tells you how big your position is relative to that buffer. When your unrealized loss equals your margin, you're broke and the exchange liquidates you to protect itself.

If you put up $100 at 10x, you control $1,000 of notional. A 1% move on $1,000 is $10 — that's 10% of your margin. So a 10% adverse move wipes your margin. Flip it around for any leverage:

That's the headline. The real number is slightly tighter, because exchanges liquidate before your margin hits exactly zero — they keep a maintenance margin (often ~0.5% of notional on majors) and take fees out too. So the true distance is a hair less than 100%/leverage. Here's both, side by side.

The numbers that matter

Isolated margin, no added collateral, ~0.5% maintenance margin plus taker fees baked in. Cross margin and partial liquidations change the mechanics; coins with higher maintenance tiers liquidate sooner. Run your exact pair and leverage in the calculator below.

Why 100x is a coin flip you've already lost

Look at the bottom row. At 100x, a 0.8% move against you is the end. For context, Bitcoin's average daily range is several percent, and even on a "quiet" day it routinely wicks 0.8% in a couple of minutes. You are not betting on direction at 100x — you're betting that ordinary market noise won't touch a level that noise touches constantly. The position can be perfectly right on direction over the next hour and still get stopped out by a sub-1% flush on the way there.

This is the part the "100x available!" button never shows you: the higher the leverage, the more your survival depends on randomness rather than your read of the market. Going from 50x to 100x doesn't double your edge — it halves the noise you can survive, from ~1.7% to ~0.8%.

The asymmetry nobody prices in

There's a second trap hiding in the table. Liquidation distance shrinks linearly with leverage, but the probability of price touching that distance doesn't shrink linearly — it climbs fast as the band gets tight, because small moves are far more frequent than large ones. Halving your liquidation distance more than doubles the chance you hit it within any given window. That's why doubling leverage feels like it "suddenly" stops working: you've walked off the part of the curve where moves are rare into the part where they happen all day.

And the move only needs to touch the level once. A wick that immediately reverses still liquidates you at 100x — you don't get the reversal, the exchange got your margin. Being right and being early are the same thing as being wrong when your buffer is 0.8% wide.

What the math says to do

• Pick leverage from the move you expect, backwards. If a normal pullback on your pair is 3%, anything above ~25x liquidates on a routine pullback. Choose leverage so your liquidation distance is comfortably outside normal noise, not inside it.
• Stop before the exchange does. Your stop-loss should sit well in front of liquidation. If your stop and your liquidation price are close together, your leverage is too high — you've given yourself no room to be wrong cheaply. See the gap directly in the Rekt Risk Score.
• Size from risk, not from the max button. A smaller position at lower leverage with the same dollar risk survives the wick that ends the 100x version. The position size calculator works this out from the loss you're willing to take.
• Add the costs. Liquidation distance is before fees and funding. Both eat into your buffer, so the real liquidation point is always a touch closer than the clean number.

None of this is a backtest or a prediction — it's one division you can do in your head: 100 divided by your leverage. Do it before every trade, compare it to how much your coin actually moves in an hour, and the leverage slider stops being a thrill and starts being a risk dial. Check your own pair in the calculators below.

Method: distances derived from the standard isolated-margin relationship (liquidation occurs when unrealized loss ≈ posted margin − maintenance margin). Real figures shown use a representative ~0.5% maintenance margin for major USDT perps as of June 2026; maintenance tiers rise for smaller coins and larger positions, moving liquidation closer. Cross margin, added collateral and partial liquidation modes alter the outcome. Figures are exact arithmetic for the stated assumptions, not a market forecast.

• Liquidation calculator — your exact liquidation price for any pair and leverage
• Leverage liquidation table — the distance at every leverage, side by side
• Rekt Risk Score — how close your stop sits to liquidation, scored 0–100
• Position size calculator — size from risk, not the max button
• BTC 100x liquidation calculator · ETH 50x · SOL 25x