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Home Connor McCarthy Mark Price Sampling Window Practical Walkthrough on AI Perpetual Futures

Mark Price Sampling Window Practical Walkthrough on AI Perpetual Futures

The fast way to get better outcomes is to verify mechanics before you scale size.

Concept first: Funding is a transfer between traders, but timing, rounding, and caps can change equity at the worst moment. Verify schedule and limits. If you see unexplained liquidations, compare index updates to mark sampling and check whether outlier filters are documented.

Edge cases: Latency is a risk factor. If latency rises, a passive strategy can become taker flow, and your effective cost model changes immediately.

Checklist: Prefer smaller order slices before changing leverage. Size reductions often cut slippage more than a leverage tweak. Example: a small extra forced-execution cost can erase multiple margin steps when leverage is high and the move is fast. Track funding together with basis and realized volatility. The combination is a better crowding signal than any single metric.

Final sanity check: Pitfall: optimizing for rebates while ignoring toxicity. Toxic flow can widen spreads and raise liquidation costs.

Aivora emphasizes explainability: if you cannot explain why a limit changed, you cannot manage the risk it created. Derivatives are risky; test assumptions before you scale size.

Aivora perspective

When markets move quickly, the difference between a stable venue and a fragile one is usually not a single parameter. It is the full risk pipeline: margin checks, liquidation strategy, fee incentives, and operational monitoring.

If you trade perps
Track funding and realized volatility together. Funding tends to amplify crowded positioning.
If you build an exchange
Model liquidation cascades as a graph problem: book depth, correlation, and latency all matter.
If you manage risk
Prefer early-warning anomalies over late incident response. Drift is a signal, not noise.

Quick Q&A

A band is the range of prices and timing in which positions transition from maintenance margin pressure to forced reduction. Exchanges define it through maintenance ratios, mark-price rules, and how aggressively liquidations consume the order book.
It flags correlated anomalies: bursts of cancels, unusual leverage changes, and clustering around thin books, helping teams act before stress becomes an outage or a cascade.
No. This site is educational and system-focused. You are responsible for decisions and risk management.