Distance to liquidation is only half the number
Every liquidation calculator gives you a percentage: "you get liquidated 3.4% from entry." On its own that figure tells you almost nothing about risk, because risk is distance relative to motion. The same 3.4% is a sleepy cushion on Bitcoin and a death sentence on a freshly listed microcap that routinely swings 12% before lunch. What actually predicts whether ordinary noise closes your position is the ratio of your liquidation distance to the coin's typical daily move — and that ratio is what this calculator reports, in the most intuitive unit there is: average days of movement.
If the answer is "0.6 average days," it means a perfectly normal day for this coin can liquidate you without any news, any cascade, any bad luck — you're betting on a coin flip and paying funding for the privilege. If it's "3 average days," ordinary volatility has room to wash back and forth without touching your liquidation price, and the trade is decided by your thesis rather than by noise. This is the same logic behind volatility-based position sizing and the safe leverage calculator — let the coin's real behaviour, not a round-number leverage, set the risk.
How to use it
1. Pick long or short.
2. Enter your leverage and the coin's typical daily move — use a preset chip or check the average daily candle on your chart (roughly high-minus-low as a % of price).
3. Adjust the maintenance-margin rate to your tier (often 0.4–1%).
4. Read the average-days cushion, then scan the table to see where the leverage stops being a coin flip.
Common mistakes
Reading the % distance in isolation. 2% sounds fine until you remember the coin moves 6% on a quiet day. Using liquidation as a stop. Liquidation is the wipeout, not the exit — your stop should trigger long before it; see the stop-loss calculator. Forgetting volatility clusters. "Typical" days are averages; volatility arrives in bursts, so a one-day cushion really means "one calm day, then nothing." Ignoring funding and fees. Both nibble margin and pull liquidation slightly closer the longer you hold — check the funding cost.
FAQ
Where do I find the coin's typical daily move? Eyeball the last week or two of daily candles: the average distance from high to low as a percent of price is a good proxy, or use the ATR(14) on the daily timeframe divided by price. The preset chips give ballpark figures by market cap.
Is more average days always better? For survival, yes — a bigger cushion means noise is less likely to close you. The trade-off is capital efficiency: a huge cushion ties up margin. The sweet spot for most swing trades is a cushion of two to three average days plus a real stop well inside it.
Does this replace a stop-loss? No. It tells you whether your leverage is sane for the coin's volatility. You should still exit on a planned stop far short of liquidation — this just stops you from picking leverage where noise alone does the exiting for you.