Every exchange dangles a big number at you: 50x, 100x, 125x. What none of them put next to it is the move that wipes you out. So here it is, in one table. The maths is simple and it isn't on your side.
For an isolated long, liquidation sits at roughly entry × (1 − 1/leverage + maintenance margin). With a typical 0.5% maintenance margin, that turns into a single number for each leverage: how far price can move against you before the position is gone.
| Leverage | Move against you to liquidate | Reality |
|---|---|---|
| 5x | ~19.5% | room to be wrong |
| 10x | ~9.5% | a bad day |
| 20x | ~4.5% | a normal candle |
| 25x | ~3.5% | a single news tick |
| 50x | ~1.5% | a wick |
| 100x | ~0.5% | spread + slippage |
| 125x | ~0.3% | basically noise |
Read the bottom rows again. At 100x a 0.5% move liquidates you. Bitcoin does that while you're reading this sentence. At 125x you're gone on a 0.3% flicker — less than the spread on a thin alt. The high leverage isn't a tool, it's a countdown.
Why the small numbers aren't generous either
People look at 5x and think "boring." But 5x already means a 20% drawdown ends you, and on a leveraged alt 20% is one ugly weekend. The point of lower leverage isn't that you can't get liquidated. It's that you get room — room to place a stop, room for a wick to pass, room to be wrong and still be in the trade.
What my own backtests showed
This isn't theory for me. When I ran thousands of strategy configs across hundreds of coins, the setups that looked best on paper carried maximum drawdowns of −10% to −14% per trade. On paper that's survivable because a simulator never runs out of margin. In a real account, a −14% excursion is a liquidation at anything above ~7x. The backtest "wins"; the live account doesn't. The gap between those two is almost always leverage.
How I use this now
I pick leverage backwards. First I decide how far the market can plausibly move against me before my idea is wrong — say 8%. Then I pick a leverage where liquidation sits well beyond that, with a stop-loss in front of it. That usually lands me at 3–8x, never near the headline number. The exchange's max is a marketing figure, not a setting you're meant to use.
If you want your exact level instead of the rounded table, the liquidation calculator takes your entry, leverage and maintenance margin and prints the price — it even loads the live coin price for you. Then size the trade from what you're willing to lose with the position size calculator. Do those two things and the leverage slider stops being a self-destruct button.