How far must one index exchange deviate to liquidate you?
Assumes an equally weighted index: a deviation of D% on one of N sources shifts the index by roughly D/N, and each source's contribution is clamped at the deviation cap. This is why single-venue manipulation is expensive and why it stops working past the cap.
| One venue dumps | Counted after cap | Index moves | Implied mark | Liquidated? |
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Two different numbers, one liquidation engine
Every liquidation calculator on the internet — including ours — gives you a single liquidation price and leaves it there. In practice that number is compared against the mark price, and the mark price is not what your candles plot. Positive basis (mark above last) is a cushion for longs and a hazard for shorts; negative basis flips it. Work out where your stop sits relative to both with the stop-loss vs liquidation gap calculator, and size the wick you actually need to survive with the stop-hunt buffer calculator.
Why the candle lied to you
The single most common "the exchange stole my money" complaint is some version of this: the chart wicked to $57,000, my liquidation was at $56,900, and I got liquidated anyway. Or the mirror image — the wick clearly pierced the liquidation line and the position was still open when the dust settled. Neither is a bug. Perpetual futures on Binance, Bybit, OKX and effectively every major venue liquidate against the mark price, a fair-value number built from an index of spot prices across several constituent exchanges, plus a smoothed basis or funding component. The candle on your screen is the last traded price on that one order book. On a quiet day the two sit within a few basis points of each other. During the exact moments that matter — a cascade, a thin-book Sunday-night flush, a single whale hitting bids — they can separate by a full percent or more, and that separation is the difference between a closed position and an open one.
The direction of the gap decides who it helps. A positive basis, mark above last, is a cushion for a long: your book prints $57,000 while the mark reads $57,228, and the liquidation engine never sees the level. That same positive basis is pure hazard for a short, whose liquidation sits above and is pulled toward it. This is also why a low-liquidity altcoin perp is more dangerous than its liquidation price implies: the thinner the local book, the further the last price can travel from the index, and the less predictable the sign of that travel becomes at the moment of stress.
The second half of this calculator answers the question that actually determines whether the index protects you: how far does one exchange have to move to drag the whole thing? With an equally weighted index of five constituents, a venue printing 10% below the pack contributes about 2% to the index — and most exchanges clamp each source at roughly 5% from the median, so a source that dumps 20% still contributes only the capped 5/5 = 1%. That clamp is the real protection. It also explains why manipulation attempts target the thinnest constituent of small-cap indices rather than large-cap ones, and why the answer to "can they hunt my liquidation" depends far more on how the index is built than on how big your position is.