Reference
Trading risk
The ways you can lose money here, stated plainly.
Perpetual futures are leveraged. You can lose more than you expected to, faster than you expected to, and you can lose all of it. Nothing on this page is financial advice.
Leverage multiplies both directions
Section titled “Leverage multiplies both directions”Leverage means your position is larger than your collateral. A 10x position moves ten times as much, in your favour and against you. A 10% adverse move against 10x leverage removes your margin entirely.
Higher leverage is not a more aggressive version of the same trade. It is a different trade with a much closer failure point.
Liquidation
Section titled “Liquidation”If your margin falls below the maintenance requirement, the exchange closes your position. This is automatic, it happens at the venue, and neither XIO nor Lloyd can stop it or negotiate it.
You do not get the price you hoped for. Liquidations happen in the conditions that cause them — thin books, fast moves — and the fill reflects that. A liquidation can take your entire margin.
Funding
Section titled “Funding”Perps hold their price to the underlying market by paying funding between longs and shorts, periodically. Hold a position long enough on the wrong side of funding and the carry alone can be a meaningful cost, even if the price never moves against you.
Slippage and gaps
Section titled “Slippage and gaps”The price you see is not a promise. In volatile conditions, orders fill worse than expected, stops trigger below where you set them, and markets gap through levels without trading at them. Stops reduce risk. They do not cap it.
An agent trading on your behalf
Section titled “An agent trading on your behalf”Lloyd can be wrong. It can misread a market, interpret your plan differently than you meant, or trade into conditions you would have sat out.
The three checks constrain what it can do — size, leverage, markets, budget. They do not make its judgement good. A trade fully inside your plan can still lose money, and a plan you wrote badly will be followed faithfully into a loss.
Software and dependencies
Section titled “Software and dependencies”XIO runs on infrastructure that can fail. Hyperliquid can be degraded or unreachable. Our systems can have bugs. Network conditions can delay an order past the moment it made sense. Positions can be open while a component is down.
We design so that failures stop trading rather than corrupt it — but “stopped” is not the same as “closed”, and an open position in an outage is exposed.
What we are not saying
Section titled “What we are not saying”We are not saying XIO makes trading safe. The non-custodial design means we cannot take your money and a compromise of our systems cannot drain your vault. That is a real guarantee about custody. It is not a guarantee about outcomes.