Inside the terminal

A practical note on getting started. The first real position is almost always smaller than it should be, and that is usually the right instinct. Trading a market is different from reading about it — the order ticket teaches you things the chart cannot. Open a small position on a deep market you understand, hold it through a funding interval or two so you feel the carry directly, and pay attention to how the liquidation price moves relative to the underlying. Once that mental model is solid, scaling up is a tooling decision rather than a learning one. The blog has onboarding, fundamentals, and risk management archives written specifically for the first few months of trading on-chain perpetuals.

A note on risk. Perpetual futures are leveraged instruments. A 1% move against a 20× long erases roughly 20% of the collateral backing that position, and Hyperliquid and trade.xyz both liquidate positions automatically once margin falls below the maintenance threshold. Funding accrues every interval at the rate displayed on the market page and compounds quickly at high leverage. Most experienced traders on these venues size well below the maximum, set explicit invalidation levels before entering, and treat the live liquidation price on the order ticket as a hard constraint rather than a hypothetical. Nothing on this page is investment advice; trading perpetual futures involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all users. Local laws and tax treatments around self-custodial derivatives vary by jurisdiction — readers are responsible for the rules that apply where they live.