Margin/Collateral

As the terms of service make clear, manipulative behavior is not tolerated on FTX.  Any attempts to do so may result in account termination at FTX's sole discretion.

All margin is posted in 'USD' in your wallet.  USD can be funded by depositing either USDC, TUSD, USDP, BUSD, or HUSD.

By default all positions use the same collateral pool, and all USD, non-USD fiat, BTC, USDT, ETH, and many other tokens in your wallet count as collateral.  Each subaccount has one central collateral wallet and uses cross margining for the account.  Each subaccount has separate margin and collateral from other subaccounts.

If you want to use isolated margin create a subaccount for that position and move in collateral.  This means that the fund you can lose on a trade are limited to those in the subaccount that does the trade (and will never include funds not on FTX).

Please note that hedged positions on the same underlying index will not reduce the collateral requirements for both positions, although in practice the PnL will cancel out as the market moves. For example if you have a short position on BTC-Perpetuals, the collateral requirements for adding a long BTC-0327 position will be the same as an account without the short position. 

Initial Margin

An account can only increase its position as long as its Margin Fraction is above its Initial Margin Fraction. For small positions, this means that the Margin Fraction must be at least 5%, meaning that accounts can only initialize positions to a maximum of 20x leverage.  As your position size increases, so does your Initial Margin Fraction. 

In addition, you can select a maximum leverage (per subaccount) on your account page.  You may not put on a position that would put your leverage higher than that.  (In other words--your maximum initial leverage is min(1/initial margin fraction, account leverage).

For instance, if you deposit $1,000 of collateral into your account, then the maximum position size you can put on is:

3x Leverage: $3,000

5x Leverage: $5,000

10x Leverage: $10,000

20x Leverage: $20,000

If your Initial Margin Fraction is 12%, then that means that your maximum leverage is 1/12% = 8.333x, so if you deposit $1,000 of collateral you could put on a position of size $8,333.

Maintenance Margin

If you Margin Fraction falls below your Maintenance Margin Fraction, your account will begin to get liquidated.  For instance, if your maintenance margin fraction is 6%, then you will begin to get liquidated once you are 16.66x leveraged.

If you drop below maintenance margin, the FTX risk engine will send liquidation orders in the market to close down your position.

If you drop below auto-close margin fraction, then your position will begin to be closed at the zero price against the backstop liquidity providers.

See here for more details about the liquidation engine.

Non-USD Collateral

Balances of the following coins also count towards collateral:

In the event that your USD balance falls too far below zero (see below for details), some of your balances in the above coins may be automatically traded into to USD by sending market orders into the corresponding FTX spot markets.
You can choose whether to use FTT as collateral on the settings page. By default your account will use FTT as collateral. Note that Weight (total) is used to determine collateral for the purpose of liquidations, and Weight (initial) is for the purpose of opening new positions.

Any positive PnL will be paid out in USD regardless of which type of collateral you use.

FTX will trade your non-USD collateral into USD if your USD balance is negative and any of the following hold:

• You are close to liquidation: your account's margin fraction is less than (20bps + maintenance margin fraction requirement)
• Your negative USD balance is large: over $30,000 in magnitude
• Your negative USD balance is large when compared to overall collateral: its magnitude is over 4 times larger than your net account collateral

See here for more details. 

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