One question, one answer

What leverage should a beginner use in crypto futures?

Answered from our own book: how often trades at each leverage band end in a forced close, and what the middle trade in each band actually returns.

Practice at your chosen leverage, freeLiquidation price calculatorPractising for a funded accountThe Academy, from the words up

The one piece of arithmetic that decides it

Leverage does not change how much you can make. It changes how far price has to move against you before the position is gone, and that distance is roughly 1 / leverage.

At 10x, a 10% move against you wipes the margin. At 25x it takes 4%. At 100x it takes 1%. At 125x, 0.8% - which Bitcoin covers in an ordinary hour and an altcoin covers between two sips of coffee. The maintenance margin the venue holds back takes a little more off each of those numbers, so the real distance is always slightly shorter than the headline suggests.

This is why the question is not "how much leverage can I get" but "how wrong can I afford to be". A beginner is going to be wrong often, and being wrong is only educational if you are still in the market afterwards.

The three numbers a venue quotes, and what they hide

Maximum leverage is a marketing number. A venue advertising 125x will quietly cut the ceiling as your position grows, because maintenance margin rises with size - so the 125x on the banner is available on a position too small to matter to you.

Cross vs isolated decides what gets taken when it goes wrong. Isolated margin risks only what you put on that trade; cross margin lets one bad position reach into everything else in the account. A beginner wants isolated, every time, and wants to know which one is selected before the first order, not after.

The fee is charged on the full position, not on your margin. A taker fee of 0.055% on a $10,000 position is about $11 to open and close - trivial against $10,000, and 11% of your money if your margin was $100. High leverage quietly multiplies your fee bill against your own capital, and that alone turns a break-even strategy into a losing one.

Why almost everybody lands in the same band, and what it costs them

Look at the sample column in the table above: the middle bands hold most of the trades. That is not a coincidence. Exchanges default there, the sizing feels significant without feeling insane, and it is where a modest account can still open a position big enough to be interesting.

It is also where the liquidation rate stops being small. The step from the low bands to the middle is where the share of trades that end in a forced close first becomes a routine outcome rather than an accident - and the step above it is where the median trade stops making money at all.

The honest reading is not "leverage is bad". It is that leverage is a time limit. The more you take, the less room the market has to be temporarily wrong before you are permanently out, and beginners are not usually wrong about direction so much as about timing.

A number you can actually start with

Start at 3x to 5x and do not move up until your record says you should. Not because it is virtuous, but because at 5x a 20% move is your stop-out distance, and 20% is more than most majors do in a week - which means the market has to genuinely disagree with you, not merely wobble, before you are removed.

Then size the position from the risk, not from the leverage. Decide what you are willing to lose on the trade - 1% to 2% of the account is the conventional answer and it is conventional because it survives a losing streak - put the stop where the idea is wrong, and let those two numbers set the position. Leverage becomes an output of that arithmetic rather than a dial you pick first. The liquidation calculator will show you exactly where the position dies before you open it.

And check the funding rate before holding anything leveraged overnight. A crowded side pays the other one every few hours, and at high leverage that bill lands against your margin rather than against the position.

Find your number where it costs nothing

Every figure on this page came from people doing exactly this on MarginPad’s paper terminal - real live prices, real fees on both legs, funding on held positions, and liquidation checked against one-minute candle extremes rather than closes, so a wick that retraced still takes the position the way it would on a real venue.

Run the leverage you are considering for a couple of weeks and read your own trading report: it will tell you your win rate, your worst leverage band and your worst hour of the day, from your own closes rather than from a feeling. If your record at 25x is worse than your record at 5x - and for most people it is - that is the answer, and it cost nothing to find out.

One caveat about the numbers above, stated plainly: the traders in them are risking simulated money, which makes them bolder than they would be with their own. Read the high bands as an upper bound on what recklessness costs, not as a forecast for a funded account.

Questions

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