Your positions
Correlation ρ = how closely this asset tracks the "market" (BTC) direction — 1.0 for BTC itself, ~0.85 for ETH, ~0.6-0.7 for large-cap alts, ~0.3-0.4 for low-correlation/meme names. Leave notional at 0 to skip a row.
Isolated vs portfolio margin
Portfolio margin at different stress levels
Same positions, same net exposure — only the stress-scenario size changes. Notice the floor binding at low stress and the isolated-margin ceiling binding at high stress.
| Stress move | Portfolio margin | vs isolated |
|---|
Why isolated margin overcharges hedged books
Isolated margin is position-by-position accounting: each position gets its own margin bucket sized to its own leverage, with zero awareness of what else is in your account. If you're long $50k of BTC at 10x and separately short $30k of a correlated altcoin at 10x, isolated mode locks up $8,000 total — even though those two positions substantially offset each other's directional risk. You're paying full collateral for risk that mostly cancels out.
Portfolio (cross/risk-based) margin, the mode exchanges like Bybit, OKX, Binance and on-chain venues like Hyperliquid and ApeX now offer, prices the whole book together. It runs your combined position through a stress scenario — "what happens to net P&L if the market moves X% in either direction" — and sizes required collateral to that net outcome instead of the sum of individual requirements. A book with genuine offsetting exposure needs meaningfully less collateral; a book where everything points the same direction gets essentially no discount, because there's no real netting to price in.
Two guardrails keep this realistic instead of theoretical. First, a floor: even a "perfectly" hedged book still carries basis risk, funding divergence and correlation-breakdown risk, so exchanges never let portfolio margin fall below some minimum percentage of isolated margin — this calculator defaults that floor to 20%, adjustable. Second, a ceiling: portfolio margin is capped at what isolated margin would already require, so switching modes can never cost you more collateral than staying isolated, even for a fully directional, unhedged book. The capital efficiency multiplier this calculator shows only gets meaningfully above 1× when your positions actually offset — plug in your real book to see if a mode switch is worth it.