How to place your first trade on Hyperliquid

The clicks are not the hard part

Placing an order takes about thirty seconds, and the walkthrough covers every one of those clicks with screenshots. This page is about the five decisions that happen before them, because those are what determine whether the trade was any good.

Decision three, which is really the only one

Everything else on this page is conventional. This is the part people get wrong, and it is arithmetic rather than judgement.

Size the position from the distance to your stop, not from what your balance allows.

Work it in this order:

1. Choose the price where your reason for the trade is wrong. That is the stop.
2. Measure the distance from your entry to it, as a percentage.
3. Decide what being wrong may cost you — a number you would shrug at.
4. Divide: position notional = what you may lose ÷ stop distance.

A worked example. Say you have $1,000, and you are willing to lose $20 on being wrong. Your stop sits 4% below your entry.

$20 ÷ 0.04 = $500 of notional. Not $1,000, and not $5,000 because 5x leverage was available.

Leverage is not the exposure

The most common misunderstanding on any perps venue, and it is worth being precise.

Your exposure is the notional — $500 in the example above. That is what moves with the price. Leverage determines how much collateral is set aside to hold it, and therefore how far the price can move before you are liquidated.

$500 of exposure at 2x uses $250 of margin and liquidates a long way away. The same $500 at 20x uses $25 and liquidates almost immediately. The profit and loss per dollar of price movement is identical. The only thing that changed is how much room you have.

So high leverage does not make a trade bigger. It makes the same trade fragile. The leverage guide has the per-market caps, which vary and step down as positions grow.

Use isolated margin for a first trade. It ring-fences this position’s collateral so a mistake cannot reach the rest of the account. Cross margin is more efficient and the right default later, once you know what it shares.

What it costs

At the entry tier a taker order is 0.045% of notional, or 0.0432% with a referral code applied before your first fill. On a $500 position that is cents.

Which is the useful thing to know: on a first trade the exchange fee is not the cost that matters. The spread you cross and the funding you pay while you hold are both bigger. Optimising basis points while market-ordering into a thin book is the wrong order of priorities.

Then place it

1. Set isolated margin and your leverage before sizing

   Do this first, because changing it afterwards changes the numbers you just worked out.

   You should see a liquidation price visible and far from the current price

2. Enter the notional you calculated

   Check the dollar figure, not the coin quantity. A misplaced decimal in the quantity field is the most common expensive slip, and the notional makes it obvious.

   You should see an order ticket showing the size in both the asset and in dollars

3. Place a limit order at or just inside the current price

   A resting order pays the maker fee and cannot fill badly. If it does not fill, nothing has gone wrong; adjust or cancel.

   You should see a resting order in the Open Orders table, then a filled position

4. Attach the stop immediately

   At the level you chose in step one of the arithmetic, not a round percentage. How the trigger actually behaves matters here: it sends an order, it does not promise a price.

   You should see a trigger order in the TP/SL column, below the market for a long

5. Read the position panel once, then leave it

   The liquidation price is the number to know. The funding column is the cost accumulating quietly while you wait.

   You should see entry, liquidation, unrealised profit, funding and margin, all visible

The four ways a first trade usually goes wrong

Sizing from the balance. “I have $1,000, so I will trade $1,000.” That skips the only calculation on this page.

Confusing leverage with conviction. Leverage is not an expression of how sure you are. Size is.

Moving the stop. Widening it as the price approaches is the reliable way to convert a small planned loss into a large unplanned one.

Trading a market you found in the list. A familiar ticker with thin volume costs far more to enter and exit than its fee schedule suggests. Start where the book is deep, then explore.

After it is open

Two things to know while a position runs: funding is charged hourly and accrues whether or not the price moves, and closing properly needs the reduce-only flag so an exit cannot open a new position by accident.

When the first one is done, the trading section covers what to learn next in roughly the order it becomes useful.