How leverage works
What exposure, margin and a multiplier actually are, and why the stake is not the risk.
Leverage is a divider, not a multiplier
Leverage is sold as a multiplier on outcome. Mechanically it is a divider on tolerance. A stake of $100 at 50x controls $5,000 of exposure, so every 1% the market moves is $50, which is half your stake. Nothing about the market changed; what changed is how much of it you can absorb.
Exposure is stake multiplied by leverage. Profit and loss is exposure multiplied by the proportional move. Those two lines are the whole of it, and everything else, including liquidation, is a consequence.
Margin, exposure and the multiplier
Your stake is the margin. The exposure is the notional position the venue opens against that margin. When the venue quotes a maximum leverage it is telling you the smallest margin it will accept for a given exposure, not the size of the opportunity.
Where it bites
Costs are charged on exposure, not on stake. A 16 basis point round trip is 0.16% of exposure regardless of leverage, which is 1.6% of your stake at 10x and 160% at 1000x. That is a fixed, knowable loss that scales linearly with the multiplier you pick.
Across the 45 markets on this site the median worst single-session drop over the last 30 sessions is 6.30%, and 45 of them would have liquidated a 100x long at some point in that window. Zcash sits at the violent end with 117% realised volatility; S&P 500 ETF sits at the calm end with 12%. Same multiplier, very different survival odds.
What to do with this
Pick the market first and the multiplier second, which is the opposite of how most people do it. Open the market page, read the liquidation distance table, find the rung whose distance is comfortably wider than that market's ordinary daily range, and treat everything above it as a coin toss with a bill attached.