How to set a stop-loss on Hyperliquid — the mark-price trigger, the 10% you never chose, and the leverage ceiling it implies
Key takeaways
- A market stop-loss on Hyperliquid may fill up to 10% past its trigger — $1,000 on a $10,000 position, or 222 times the $4.50 taker fee everybody compares venues over.
- That band is the same width at every leverage. What changes is your buffer — so above roughly 8.99x on BTC the band is wider than the entire distance from entry to liquidation.
- Invert the venue’s own liquidation formula and the stop you want becomes a leverage ceiling: 5% needs 16x or less, 10% needs 8x or less, 20% needs 4x or less.
- Attach the stop to the position, not the order. A child stop on a partially filled parent order is cancelled along with the parent, leaving the filled part unprotected.
What price actually triggers a stop-loss on Hyperliquid?
The mark price. Not the last trade, not the best bid, and not whatever your chart happens to be printing. That distinction is worth more than it sounds, because it decides how easy your stop is to run into by accident.
The documentation defines mark price as the median of three inputs: the oracle price plus a 150-second exponential moving average of the gap between Hyperliquid’s mid price and that oracle; the median of best bid, best ask and last trade on Hyperliquid; and a weighted median of the perpetual mid prices on Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io and MEXC, weighted 3, 2, 2, 1, 1. The oracle price itself is a weighted median of centralised-exchange prices published by validators roughly every three seconds, and mark price updates on the same rhythm.
Two consequences follow, and they point in opposite directions.
- A wick on Hyperliquid’s own book is one vote out of three. For the mark price to move, the other venues have to move with it. This is genuinely good news for anyone who has watched a stop get picked off by a single exchange’s five-second flush.
- Your stop will not sit exactly where your eyes think it does. The support FAQ exists partly because people set a take-profit at a price they could see on the chart, watched it trigger, and still booked a loss. The FAQ’s wording is blunt: “Trade price and mark price are different.” If you are placing a stop within a few tenths of a percent of the current price, you are inside the distance mark and trade price routinely disagree by.
The same mark price triggers liquidations and computes unrealised profit and loss, which is why the rest of this page can compare a stop and a liquidation level on the same scale at all — they are measured with the same ruler.
Where do you place the stop — on the position or on the order?
Hyperliquid gives you two places to attach a stop, and they behave differently enough that picking the wrong one is a real way to end up unprotected.
From the position form, a stop defaults to the size of the entire position and closes all of it when it triggers. The one caveat in the docs: if you type a specific size on it, that stop becomes fixed-size and will not resize when the position does. Add to a position later and the old stop still covers only the old size.
From the order form, the stop is a child of the order you are placing, at that order’s size, and the rule is stricter than most people expect. The documentation states it in italics: child TP/SL orders “will be placed if and only if the parent order fully fills or is partially filled followed by a cancelation for insufficient margin”. Read the middle of that sentence carefully. If your limit order fills half and you cancel the rest yourself, the child stop goes with it — and you are left holding half a position with nothing attached to it. The venue does not warn you; the order simply disappears from the list.
For a first position the safe habit is therefore boring: place the entry, wait for the fill, then add the stop from the position row. One extra step, and the failure case above cannot happen. If you are coming from a centralised exchange where the same checkbox does both jobs, the Bybit version of this problem is a useful contrast — different interface, same trap, different name.
Why does a market stop-loss carry a 10% slippage tolerance?
Because it is a market order, and market orders on Hyperliquid have a tolerance so they cannot be filled at an absurd price in an empty book. The Order types page says it plainly — “TP and SL are automatically market orders” — and the TP/SL page puts a number on it: “TP/SL market orders have a slippage tolerance of 10%.”
Ten percent is not a protection. It is a permission, and it is a wide one. Here is what it authorises on the site’s standard example — a $10,000 BTC long entered at $100,000, with a stop trigger 3% below at $97,000.
The shaded band runs from the trigger at $97,000 down to $87,300. Every price in it is a fill your own stop order has agreed to accept. The band is $9,700 wide, which on this position is $1,000.
Now put the liquidation levels on the same scale, which is the thing no other guide seems to do. Maintenance margin on BTC is 1.25% of notional — half the initial margin at the asset’s 40x cap, per the Margin tiers page — so liquidation for this long sits at $96,203 at 20x, $91,139 at 10x and $81,013 at 5x.
- At 20x, only $797 of that $1,000 band lies above the liquidation level. That is 8.2% of it. The other 91.8% of the range your stop authorised is on the far side of a line where the venue would have closed you anyway — and where, if equity falls below two-thirds of maintenance and the backstop vault has to take the position, you also forfeit the maintenance margin.
- At 5x, the entire band sits above liquidation, with $15,987 of room. The stop wins that race every time.
Run the venue’s liquidation formula backwards and you can find the exact leverage where the room equals the band. On BTC it is 8.99x. Below it, your margin buys more room than your stop can give away; above it, it does not. That crossover is not published anywhere — it falls out of two of the venue’s own numbers, and it is remarkably stable across the asset groups.
| Margin-tier group | Max leverage | Maintenance margin | Leverage where the room equals the 10% band |
|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | 40x | 1.25% | 8.99x |
| ETH | 25x | 2.00% | 8.47x |
| SOL, XRP | 20x | 2.50% | 8.16x |
| DOGE, LINK, HYPE and most mid-caps | 10x | 5.00% | 6.90x |
Between 6.90x and 8.99x on every Hyperliquid asset, the slippage tolerance on an unmodified market stop stops being a rounding error and starts being bigger than your whole buffer. That is a narrower range than most traders’ idea of “a bit of leverage”.
What stop distance can you actually afford at your leverage?
This is the section to keep. The liquidation formula on the Liquidations page is liq_price = price − side × margin_available / position_size / (1 − l × side), where l is the maintenance margin rate. For a long on isolated margin that reduces to a distance from entry of (1/L − l) / (1 − l), where L is your leverage. Everyone uses it forwards: pick a leverage, see where liquidation lands.
Turn it around and it becomes useful. If s is the stop distance you actually want, the leverage at which liquidation lands exactly on it is L = 1 / (s(1−l) + l). That is a ceiling, and it means your stop chooses your leverage, not the other way round.
| Stop you want | Leverage where liquidation lands exactly on it | Highest whole setting that keeps it | Margin on $10,000 | Actual room at that setting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1% | 44.69x | 40x (BTC cap) | $250 | 1.27% |
| 2% | 31.01x | 31x | $323 | 2.00% |
| 3% | 23.74x | 23x | $435 | 3.14% |
| 5% | 16.16x | 16x | $625 | 5.06% |
| 8% | 10.93x | 10x | $1,000 | 8.86% |
| 10% | 8.99x | 8x | $1,250 | 11.39% |
| 15% | 6.23x | 6x | $1,667 | 15.61% |
| 20% | 4.76x | 4x | $2,500 | 24.05% |
The table says something a leverage slider never will. A trader who genuinely needs a 10% stop — perfectly ordinary on a swing position in crypto — cannot use more than 8x on BTC without putting the venue’s exit in front of their own. Not “should not”: cannot, arithmetically. And notice how flat the top of the table is: going from a 1% stop to a 2% stop costs you 14x of headroom, while going from 15% to 20% costs less than 2x. Almost all the leverage you think you are gaining is spent in the first two percent.
If you want to check any single row against the venue’s own number, our liquidation price walkthrough runs the formula step by step, and funding and liquidation on Hyperliquid covers what happens after the level is reached. Still choosing where to trade at all? The venue comparison is the page for that decision.
WHEN YOU HAVE A NUMBER FOR BOTH
Affiliate disclosure first: the button below is a referral link. The venue pays us a share of its trading fees at no extra cost to you, and its published referral rules give you a 4% fee discount on your first $25M of volume. It changes nothing above — see our disclosure policy.
The two numbers this page is about are the stop distance and the leverage the table caps it at. If you have both written down, the screen is where you turn them into an order. Two sentences before you do: you hold the keys there, so losing the seed phrase loses the money and there is nobody to appeal to; and the venue checks leverage only when a position opens, never again afterwards.
Referral link — we may be paid if you sign up through it. Not offered to US persons, and readers in the UK see no venue links on this site at all. Education only; most retail traders lose money.
Market stop or limit stop — which failure do you prefer?
Having seen what 10% authorises, the obvious move is to set a limit price on the stop. Do it with your eyes open: you are not removing the failure, you are swapping it for a different one.
The venue’s own illustration is the clearest one available, so here it is in full. A stop to close a long with trigger price $10 and limit price $10 hits the book when mark price drops below $10. “If the price drops from $11 to $9 instantly it is quite likely this SL order would rest at $10 instead of filling.” Set the limit at $8 instead and it is likely to fill somewhere between $9 and $8. Same order, same trigger, entirely different outcome — decided by a box most people leave blank.
What that box is really buying, in money:
Every 0.10% of limit-price room on this $10,000 position is worth at most $10 of extra loss and a meaningfully better chance of filling. A 0.50% limit caps the damage at $50 — a twentieth of the default band — while still leaving the order five times more room than a limit set exactly at the trigger. That is the setting we would start from on a liquid market like BTC or ETH, widening it on anything thinner.
One more thing the chart makes hard to unsee. The taker fee is $4.50 a side. Traders switch venues over that number, and they should — the full fee schedule is worth knowing. But the stop setting sitting one dropdown away is worth 222 times as much on the same position, and almost nobody touches it.
What about a trailing stop?
Hyperliquid supports trailing stops on perpetual markets. The Order types page describes one as a market order triggered when the mark price retraces from its best level by a chosen distance or percentage; for a stop that closes a long, the trigger follows the highest mark price reached since activation and, in the documentation’s words, “never moves in the opposite direction.”
Two practical notes. First, it is a market order, so it inherits the whole of the previous two sections — the 10% tolerance applies, and the crossover table applies to the trailing distance exactly as it does to a fixed stop. Second, a trailing stop is a way to manage a winning position, not a substitute for deciding where you are wrong. Set the fixed stop first, get the leverage under the ceiling, and treat trailing as an upgrade you apply once the trade is working.
The same page notes that Chase orders — the post-only type that re-prices to track the book — “run in the browser tab where they are created”. Trailing stops are not described that way, but it is a reminder worth carrying on a venue like this one: check whether the order you are relying on lives on the exchange or in your tab, before you close the laptop.
Anyone whose plan is “I will just close it manually”. There is no margin call on Hyperliquid, no email, no phone alert. The documentation says leverage is checked only when the position opens and monitoring it afterwards is your responsibility. A stop is the only alarm in the building, and it has to be installed before you need it.
Anyone who cannot yet answer “where does this idea stop being right?” in percent. Every number on this page is downstream of that one. If it is not decided, start with where to place a stop and how leverage and margin work, and come back.
Anyone in the United States: the interface is not offered to US persons, and our referral link will not send you there. Readers in the UK see no venue links on this site at all, by design. Check the venue’s own terms for your country before depositing anything.
Common mistakes
- Setting the leverage first and the stop second. It is the wrong order, and it is the reason stops end up sitting a few dollars above the liquidation price. Decide the stop distance, read the ceiling off the table, then set leverage under it.
- Leaving the limit price blank and calling it a stop-loss. The order is then a market order with a documented 10% tolerance — $1,000 of permitted damage on a $10,000 position.
- Setting the limit price exactly at the trigger. The venue’s own example shows this resting unfilled through a $11-to-$9 move. If you use a limit, give it room.
- Cancelling a partially filled entry order. The child stop is cancelled with it and the filled part is left naked. Add stops from the position row instead.
- Adding to a position and forgetting the fixed-size stop. A stop with a size typed on it does not resize. The new exposure has nothing behind it.
- Reading the chart price as the trigger price. The trigger is the mark price, a median of several sources, and the support FAQ exists because that difference surprises people.
- Assuming a stop makes high leverage safe. Above roughly 8.99x on BTC the stop’s own slippage band is wider than your entire buffer. Leverage is the variable the stop cannot fix.
Frequently asked questions
What price triggers a stop-loss on Hyperliquid?
The mark price, not the last traded price. The documentation defines mark price as the median of three inputs — the oracle price plus a 150-second EMA of Hyperliquid’s basis, the median of best bid, best ask and last trade on Hyperliquid, and a weighted median of Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io and MEXC perpetual mid prices — updated roughly every three seconds. A single wick on Hyperliquid’s own book is one input out of three, so it rarely moves the trigger on its own.
Does a stop-loss on Hyperliquid guarantee my exit price?
No. The documentation states that TP and SL orders are automatically market orders and that market TP/SL orders carry a 10% slippage tolerance. On a $10,000 position that permits a fill up to $1,000 worse than the trigger. Setting a limit price on the stop narrows the range, at the cost of the order possibly resting unfilled.
Where should I place the stop relative to the liquidation price?
Above it, with room to spare — and the honest way to get there is to choose the stop distance first and let it cap your leverage. On BTC, a 5% stop needs 16x or less; a 10% stop needs 8x or less. A stop sitting a few dollars above the liquidation level is not protection, because any move fast enough to reach one reaches the other.
Why did my stop-loss trigger but not close the position?
If you set a limit price on it, the triggered order is a limit order. The venue’s own example: a stop to close a long with trigger $10 and limit $10 will rest unfilled at $10 if price drops from $11 to $9 in one move. Widening the limit price — $8 in that example — makes a fill likely somewhere between $9 and $8.
Can I attach a stop-loss to an order before it fills?
Yes, but read the rule first. Child TP/SL orders attached to a parent order are placed only if the parent fully fills, or is partially filled and then cancelled for insufficient margin. Cancel a partially filled parent yourself and the child stop is cancelled with it, leaving the filled part naked. Adding the stop from the position row after the fill avoids the whole case.
Does Hyperliquid have trailing stops?
Yes, on perpetual markets. The Order types page describes a trailing stop as a market order triggered when the mark price retraces from its best level by a chosen distance or percentage, with the trigger following the highest mark price reached since activation for a long and never moving the other way. Being a market order, it inherits the same 10% slippage tolerance.
Next, if you have not already: the account and first position walkthrough, what funding and liquidation cost you, and DEX versus CEX if you are still deciding whether a venue with no support desk is the right first home.