GlossaryLiquidations
Liquidations
Liquidations are forced closures of leveraged futures positions: when the collateral is no longer enough, the exchange closes the position with a market order. The pane shows, per candle, how much was liquidated on the long side and on the short side. These are measured values, not estimates.
How to read them
- Long liquidations (bars pointing up, red by default) are forced sells. A big spike after a price crash is a long cascade. It often marks a temporary low, because the leveraged longs are out of the market.
- Short liquidations (bars pointing down, turquoise by default) are forced buys. A big spike while the price is rising is a short squeeze.
- Read liquidations together with open interest: if it falls at the same moment, the move was mainly a reduction of leverage.
- The zero line is not necessarily in the middle: the scale reaches up to the largest long sum and down to the largest short sum in the visible range.
- With Value label on axis, the larger of the two values appears as a label on the scale, in the color of its side. A candle without liquidations appears there as 0 on a gray background.
Good to know
- Candles before the start of the data are shaded gray, and the pane header states from when values exist.
- Hours without data are also shaded gray, and the header adds “with gaps”. If more than half is missing for a candle, it shows “–” instead of 0, so that a gap does not look like a quiet market. If a smaller part is missing, the header tells you on hover how much of it was captured.
- If the header says “lower bound”, the source does not capture every single liquidation. The real sums can then be higher.
- On seconds and tick charts, the values are coarser than the candles; the header states the resolution.
- The pane is only available for symbols traded as perpetuals.