Leverage
Leverage is exactly what the word says — a lever that moves a big position with small money. Post 1 million won as margin at 10x and you hold a 10-million-won Bitcoin position. If Bitcoin rises 1%, the position gains 100,000 won — but your own money was 1 million won, so your return on your own money is +10%. A 1% move, amplified to 10%.
The problem: the amplification doesn't care about direction. A 1% drop is -10% on your money, and a 10% drop wipes out your entire 1 million won. Before it gets there, the exchange force-closes the position — that's liquidation. The higher the multiplier, the narrower the adverse move you can survive: roughly -10% at 10x, about -5% at 20x, and barely -1% or so at 100x. Given that Bitcoin routinely swings a few percent in a day, high leverage means a brief wobble can end your account.
Leverage also carries a cost amplification that's easy to miss. Trading fees and funding are charged on the full position size, not your margin. At 10x, fees feel 10x bigger relative to your own money. If a round trip costs 0.1% of the position, at 10x that's 1% of your money gone in a single trade.
One more crucial property is the path. Without leverage, if price dips and recovers, you're back to even. With high leverage, the dip in the middle liquidates you, and you never get to enjoy the recovery. You can be right about the final direction and still get knocked out by the wiggle in between — that's leverage's cruelest part.
So the accurate way to understand leverage is not as 'a button that increases profit' but as 'a knob that turns up both the amplitude of outcomes and the odds of elimination.' Your probability of calling the direction right is exactly the same at 1x and at 100x.
What the data actually shows
Leverage is a multiplier, not an indicator, so it has no win rate of its own — but what it amplifies can be checked with data. Barobara's signal stats show that after most chart signals, price rose or fell close to fifty-fifty. Leverage amplifies that fifty-fifty outcome as-is; it doesn't change the odds. Meanwhile the fees and funding you can see in the fee summary are certain costs paid regardless of direction — and they scale with your multiplier. The odds stay the same while the costs grow: that's leverage's true face in the historical data.
Common misconceptions
'Higher leverage means higher expected returns?' Leverage widens the swing of profits and losses — the odds of up versus down stay the same. If anything, position-scaled fees and liquidation risk mean the same call tends to end worse on average at higher multipliers.
'As long as I dodge liquidation, break-even eventually comes?' At high multipliers, the wobble in the middle usually ends the account before 'eventually' arrives. And funding keeps accruing the whole time you hold — hanging on is not free either.
FAQ
Q. What's a reasonable leverage for a beginner?
There's no magic number, but the arithmetic is unambiguous: the higher the multiplier, the shorter the distance to liquidation. Roughly -10% away at 10x, about -1% at 100x. First compute the distance between Bitcoin's routine daily swing and your own liquidation price — if that distance is narrower than a normal day's move, it's reasonable to treat the risk as very high.
Q. With leverage, is my maximum loss still capped at my margin?
With isolated margin, your maximum loss is generally the margin posted to that position. With cross margin, your entire account balance is collateral, so one position's losses can drain the whole account. Same multiplier, completely different worst case depending on margin mode — always check.