By the end you will know what a 10x long is mechanically, what "I got liquidated" actually means, and why leverage deletes accounts in both directions.
Sooner or later you will see it in a group chat or under a chart: I got liquidated. An account that existed at midnight is empty by morning. No hack, no scam, nobody to report.
This lesson is the machine behind those three words. If you did our Web3 course, you learned how markets mess with your head. Today is the tools traders actually hold: the boring one, the two directions, and the one that quietly deletes accounts.
Start with the boring tool. You pay 100, you receive the asset, and it sits in your account. The price can fall by half and you still own every unit, free to wait a decade. This is called spot: you traded money for the thing itself.
Everything else in this lesson is different in kind. The other tools are side bets on the price, made with borrowed help. Most of this course assumes spot. Keep this card in mind: notice the last row says nothing can be seized.
A bet that the price rises is intuitive: buy now, sell higher later. Traders call it going long. But how do you bet that something falls?
Borrow the asset, sell it today, buy it back cheaper later, return it, keep the difference. That is a short. Markets need both directions: shorts are how disbelief gets a voice, instead of everyone politely pretending the price is fine.
Now the tool with teeth. Picture buying a 100,000 house with 10,000 down and 90,000 borrowed. You control ten times your money. If the house gains 10 percent, your 10,000 becomes 20,000. Feels like genius.
Run the other direction before celebrating. If the house falls 10 percent, the loss is 10,000: your entire deposit. A 10 percent fall did not cost you 10 percent. It cost you everything you put in. Place your bet on the trading version.