Margin and leverage

On spot you pay the full price of what you buy. On a perp you post collateral instead, and the exchange lets you hold a position worth many times that collateral. The collateral is called margin. Leverage is just the ratio between the position and the margin behind it.

Everything below is USDC. It is the only collateral asset the app deposits or shows on the Balances tab.

Cross or isolated

The toggle sits at the top-left of the order ticket, as plain text reading either Cross or Isolated. Click it to switch.

• Cross means your whole free USDC balance backs every position. A winning position cushions a losing one, so you are harder to liquidate on any single market. The cost is that a bad position can drain the balance holding up the others.
• Isolated ring-fences the margin behind a position. Only that margin is at risk, and only that margin is available to defend it, so it liquidates sooner in a move against you.

Three things about this control are worth knowing:

1. 1Margin mode is an account setting on Swapmos, not a per-order flag. Switching it applies to the account, not just the order you are about to place.
2. 2Clicking the toggle does not call the exchange straight away. The mode is sent when you press the order button, and only if it differs from what the account is already set to.
3. 3When the terminal loads, the toggle is overwritten with the account's real mode as soon as the exchange answers, so it cannot show a mode you are not actually in.

If the exchange rejects the mode change at submit time, you get a "Margin mode unchanged" warning and the order is still placed, on the old mode. Check the toggle after that warning before sizing up.

Initial margin: what it costs to open

Initial margin is what opening the position takes out of your free balance. The ticket shows it live in the Margin row above the order button, and it is simply notional divided by leverage.

At 10x, a $1,000 position needs $100 of margin. That also means the size slider's 100% is 100% of buying power, not of your balance: buying power is free balance times leverage, so 100% at 10x sizes a position ten times your free USDC.

Each market has a floor on this. The green badge in the market header, and the "max Nx" figure at the top-right of the ticket, is the market's cap, and it is exactly the inverse of its minimum initial margin. BTC at 100x needs 1% down. AAPL at 10x needs 10%.

One caveat the ticket does not show: the published cap only holds up to a size. Beyond a certain notional, the exchange requires progressively more margin, so a very large order gets a lower effective maximum than the badge suggests.

Maintenance margin: the line you must stay above

Maintenance margin is the smaller amount you must keep behind the position to keep it open. Drop below it and the position is liquidated: closed by the exchange, with the loss and a liquidation fee taken from your account. It is not a warning, and there is no margin call first.

Across Swapmos's markets, maintenance margin is usually half of initial margin:

Your account's own figure is on the Account page: open the gear icon and read the Maintenance margin line in the read-only block under the leverage buttons.

Liquidation is checked against mark price, not the last traded price. A wick on the tape that does not move the mark does not liquidate you.

Setting leverage

Two controls set it, and both write the same account-wide value.

• The ticket slider. Labelled LEVERAGE, under the order-type tabs, with the current value in a pill on the right. This is the one to use while trading.
• The Settings dialog. Gear icon on the Account page (/account), not inside the terminal. It offers a shorter fixed set of buttons: 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 50, filtered to your account maximum.

Either way, leverage is applied to the account when you submit, not held on the individual order. Raising it raises liquidation risk on every open position you already have, not only the next one.

Your actual ceiling on a market is the lower of your account setting and that market's cap. Setting the account to 100x does not unlock 100x on a 10x market.

What the ladder means

The exchange publishes a fixed set of selectable leverage values rather than a free 1 to 100 dial. There are 16 rungs:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100

It is 1x-granular from 1 to 5, then moves in 5x steps to 20, then in 10x steps to 100. That shape is deliberate: the difference between 2x and 3x is a real difference in risk, while 80x and 90x are both close to the same thing.

How the slider handles it:

• The thumb moves over rungs, not over numbers, so every step is the same width. A linear 1 to 100 track would crush the low end into a few pixels.
• The ladder is filtered to the current market's cap, so on a 10x market the slider simply ends at 10x.
• Switching to a market with a lower cap snaps your leverage down to the nearest rung it allows.
• Only the ends plus 5x, 20x and 50x get printed labels. Each printed label is a button, so you can click "20x" to jump straight there.
• At 50x and above, the value pill, the track fill and the thumb all turn red. That is the only warning the slider gives.

Reading the Liq. price row

The ticket's Liq. price row, third of the four summary rows, is an estimate for this order in isolation. It takes your entry price, your leverage and the market's maintenance margin rate, and nothing else.

It does not account for a position you already hold in that market, and it does not account for the rest of your collateral or your other positions under cross margin. In cross, your real liquidation price is usually further away than the ticket suggests, and it moves whenever any other position moves.

The figure that reflects your actual account is the Liq. column on the Positions tab of the account panel, refreshed every 5 seconds. Trade off that one once a position is open.

The part people get wrong

At 100x, a 1% move against you is your entire margin. At 50x it is 2%. Those are moves that happen inside a minute on crypto, and inside a headline on equities.

Leverage does not increase your expected return. It shortens the distance between where you are and where you are closed out. Pick a rung by asking how far the price can move against you before you would want to be out anyway, then check that the Liq. price row on the Positions tab sits further away than that.