Futures, not spot
You don't buy the coin — you open a contract on its price. That's why you can profit from a rise (LONG) or a fall (SHORT). You need a USDT-M futures account on an exchange.
How to read a signal without blowing your deposit
Every Stonks strategy and signal is for trading USDT-M perpetual futures with leverage — not for buying coins on spot. Here you'll find an interactive signal walkthrough and 20 short reads on leverage, liquidation and risk.
BEFORE YOUR FIRST TRADE
This is leveraged futures trading — here's what that means
20x leverage multiplies everything
A 1% price move is 20% of your margin — up or down. The take profit and stop loss in our signals are calculated for 20x.
Liquidation
At 20x, a move of roughly 4–5% against you wipes out the trade's margin. That's why a stop loss is mandatory, and the margin should be isolated and only money you can afford to lose.
Funding and fees
Perpetual futures charge or pay funding every 8 hours, and the exchange takes a fee. Our results exclude both — factor them in yourself.
INTERACTIVE WALKTHROUGH
What a signal is made of
This is what a price move forecast looks like in the Premium channel. It's an example, not a signal: the levels are calculated from the current BTC price, which refreshes every 15 seconds.
Step 1 of 10
Trading pair
The coin and the quote currency. BTC / USDT is bitcoin priced in USDT. The signal works on any exchange that lists this pair on futures.
Tap any part of either card to see what it means. WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE
A signal arrives — the trade closes
Follow one trade from start to finish: the message with the levels, the price move and the notification that it closed at Take Profit or Stop Loss.
Stonks Premium · now
S
Stonks Premiumtyping…
Loading a trade…
- 1Signal received
- 2Trade opened
- 3Price moving
- 4Trade closed
Loading chart…
Price—
$100 at 20x—
An example built on a real trade from the table, with real candles, sped up. The levels are set at 2:1: for a winning trade, Take Profit is the actual exit price and Stop Loss is half as far; for a losing trade, Stop Loss is the actual closing price and Take Profit is twice as far. A hindsight review, not a signal.
LIBRARY
20 reads on leveraged futures trading
Leverage and margin explained
Leverage increases your position size, not your capital. Here's what's actually at stake.
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Margin is your own money that the exchange locks up for a trade. Leverage is how many times larger the position is than the margin. With 100 USDT of margin at 10x, you control a 1,000 USDT position.
Profit and loss are calculated on the whole position. A 1% price move means ±10 USDT — that's ±10% of your margin. Leverage multiplies gains and losses equally.
Result on margin = price move × leverage. It works both ways.
Isolated vs. cross margin
One switch in your exchange settings decides whether you risk the trade amount or your entire account.
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In isolated mode, only the trade's own margin backs the position. If it gets liquidated, you lose that margin and the rest of your balance is untouched.
In cross mode, your entire free balance is used to keep the position open. Liquidation comes later, but in a sharp move you can lose far more than you meant to put into one trade.
Example: you have 400 USDT in the account and put 100 USDT into a trade. If the market crashes, your maximum loss in isolated mode is 100 USDT; in cross mode, it's the whole account.
If you're new, use isolated margin only — your loss is capped at the trade amount.
How the liquidation price is calculated
Liquidation doesn't wait until you've lost 100% of your margin — the maintenance margin triggers it earlier.
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Simplified, for an isolated position: a LONG is liquidated when the price falls by roughly (1 / leverage − maintenance margin). At 20x with a 0.5% maintenance margin, that's about 4.5% against you.
The exact formula depends on the exchange, your position tier and fees. The liquidation price is always shown on the position card — check it before you enter.
At 20x, liquidation is roughly 4.5% from your entry; at 50x, about 1.5%; at 100x, about 0.5%.
Stop Loss: why and where to set it
A stop is a decision about how much you're willing to lose, made before emotions kick in.
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A Stop Loss closes your position automatically when the price hits a set level. Without one, only liquidation limits your loss.
Place the stop where the trade idea stops making sense: beyond the local low for a LONG or the local high for a SHORT, with room for normal price noise. The stop must always sit closer than the liquidation price.
In a sudden crash, a stop can fill worse than its set price — that's slippage. Isolated margin protects you here as well.
Set your stop before you enter, and always closer than liquidation.
Position sizing: the 1–2% rule
Professionals don't ask “how much can I make?” — they ask “how much do I lose if the stop is hit?”
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The rule: risk no more than 1–2% of your deposit on a single trade. Risk is the distance to your stop multiplied by your position size.
Example: a 1,000 USDT deposit at 1% risk means 10 USDT. Your stop is 2% from the entry. Position size = 10 / 0.02 = 500 USDT. At 10x, that takes 50 USDT of margin.
Here, leverage only affects how much margin gets locked up, not your risk. Risk is set by the stop and the position size.
Position size = (deposit × % risk) / distance to stop.
Risk/reward ratio
Why a strategy that wins 40% of the time can be profitable — and one that wins 70% can lose money.
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R:R is the ratio of potential profit to risk. At 1:2, you risk 1 to make 2.
To break even at 1:2, you only need to win 34% of your trades. At 2:1 (more risk than reward), you need 67% — and that's before fees.
Only look at a win rate together with R:R and fees.
Funding on perpetual futures
A hidden cost of holding a position that traders often forget about.
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Perpetual futures never expire. To keep their price anchored to spot, one side pays the other a funding rate every few hours.
Funding is charged on the whole position, not just your margin. At 20x, a 0.01% funding rate per period eats 0.2% of your margin — which adds up if you hold for long.
Holding a position for more than a few hours? Check the funding rate.
Fees and leverage
Fees are charged on position size, so with leverage they hit harder than you'd think.
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A typical taker fee on futures is about 0.04–0.05% to enter and the same to exit — roughly 0.1% of the position per trade.
At 20x, that's about 2% of your margin on every trade. Ten trades a day costs 20% of your margin in fees alone, before your first loss.
The higher the leverage and the more often you trade, the bigger the share fees take from your results.
Slippage
Why a market order doesn't fill at the price you saw.
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A market order takes the best available orders from the order book. If liquidity is thin or the market is moving fast, part of it fills at a worse price.
On illiquid coins and during news, slippage can be bigger than the move you were hoping to profit from.
On illiquid pairs and around the news, use limit orders or trade smaller.
Limit or market order
Price or a guaranteed fill: you get to pick one.
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A limit order fills only at your price or better, but it may never fill if the price doesn't come back. It usually has a lower (maker) fee.
A market order fills immediately, but at the current price, with slippage and a taker fee.
If a signal gives you an entry level, a limit order at that level is the honest way to enter exactly there. An unfilled limit order is a normal outcome, not a missed profit.
A limit order controls the price; a market order controls the fill.
Take Profit and scaling out
How to avoid handing your gains back to the market.
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A Take Profit closes your position at a set price. Like the stop, you place it in advance.
Scaling out: close part of the position at the first target and move the stop on the rest to your entry (breakeven). The trade can no longer end in a loss, and part of the position keeps working.
Set your target and your stop together, before the price starts moving.
The math of drawdowns
Why losing 50% is easy — and getting it back is twice as hard.
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After a 10% loss, you need an 11% gain to get back to even. After 50%, you need 100%. After 90%, you need 900%.
High leverage speeds up drawdowns: a few stops in a row at 50x can wipe out half your deposit in a day.
Your main job is to survive a losing streak. That's where the 1–2% risk rule comes from.
Volatility and ATR
A stop that ignores the price's normal range gets hit almost every time.
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ATR (Average True Range) is the average size of a candle over a period. It shows how much the price normally “breathes.”
A stop closer than one ATR from the entry often gets hit by noise alone. Many traders place stops 1.5–2 ATR away and reduce position size to keep the risk the same.
Base your stop distance on volatility, and your position size on risk.
Lower timeframes
1m and 3m charts give you lots of signals — and lots of noise.
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On minute charts, moves are often random, and fees and slippage eat up a large share of a typical price swing.
Higher timeframes (15m, 1h) give fewer signals, but each move is larger relative to costs. For beginners, that's usually a calmer place to start.
The lower the timeframe, the stricter you need to be about fees and stops.
Altcoin correlation with BTC
Six trades on six different coins often turn out to be one big bet on bitcoin.
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Most altcoins follow BTC. When bitcoin drops sharply, almost everything drops with it.
If you open LONGs on ETH, SOL and AVAX at the same time, your risk effectively adds up: if BTC moves against you, every stop gets hit at once.
Treat several similar positions as one large position.
News and macro events
Inflation data and Fed decisions move crypto more than any chart pattern.
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CPI releases, Fed (FOMC) meetings, listings and delistings, and exchange hacks can trigger sharp moves in both directions within seconds.
At those times slippage grows and stops can fill noticeably worse. Many traders simply don't hold leveraged positions through major releases.
Check the economic calendar before you open a leveraged trade.
FOMO and revenge trading
The two emotions most likely to wipe out a deposit.
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FOMO is the fear of missing out on a move. It pushes you to enter late, after a big run-up, without a stop and with too much leverage.
Revenge trading is the urge to win back a loss right away. Position sizes grow, the rules go out the window, and one bad trade turns into a bad day.
A rule that works: after two or three stops in a row, take a break until the next day.
A trade opened on emotion rather than on plan is a mistake — even if it closes in profit.
The trading journal
The most underrated tool: a spreadsheet that shows what actually works.
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Log every trade: the pair, why you entered, entry, stop, target, size, the result after fees, and how you felt when you entered.
After a month, your journal will show your real win rate, average R:R and the mistakes you keep repeating. Memory hides all this — it remembers wins far better than losses.
Without a journal, there's no way to know whether you have an edge.
Backtesting and overfitting
Why a strategy that looks perfect on history falls apart in real trading.
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A backtest checks trading rules against historical data. If you keep tweaking parameters until the results look great, you're fitting the rules to the past.
An honest test tunes parameters on one stretch of history and evaluates them on another that the tuning never saw — and always includes fees.
Only trust results on data that wasn't used to tune the strategy.
How to spot a dishonest signal service
Red flags that tell you you're being sold a picture, not results.
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Promises of guaranteed profit or “90% winning trades” without a full history of every signal, losses included.
Reports on winning trades only, and a “best exit” calculated in hindsight and multiplied by high leverage.
Pressure tactics: “only 3 spots left,” “today only,” “one day can change everything.” Requests to send money for them to manage, or to hand over API keys with withdrawal rights or your seed phrase.
An honest service shows every signal, explains its method and is upfront about the risks.
No full history with the stop-losses included — no reason to trust the numbers.
Read up on the risks?
A separate page has a position size and liquidation price calculator. Run the numbers on your trade before you open it.
Leveraged futures trading can cost you your entire margin. These materials are educational. They are not investment advice, a solicitation or instructions to trade.