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Before opening

Check the market, collateral token, oracle source, current price, leverage, expected fee, and liquidation estimate before opening a position. Leverage increases your exposure relative to collateral. A small adverse price move can reduce your health quickly. On Pyth-backed markets, opening, closing, and liquidating go through a path that refreshes the price feed in the same transaction and charges a small ETH update fee, so keep some ETH in your wallet for it.

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Opening a position

When you open a price position, the pool:
  1. receives your collateral
  2. deducts the opening fee
  3. uses the remaining collateral as position collateral
  4. reads the current oracle price
  5. stores your direction, leverage, entry price, and psi snapshot
  6. updates the pool’s active collateral and aggregate exposure
Your entry price is the oracle price at the time the transaction executes, not necessarily the last price shown before you signed. Opening does not use an order-book fill price. The pool uses the oracle price and risk checks for the market. Opening has guardrails that can reject the transaction:
  • Your collateral must be larger than the open fee, and the post-fee collateral must meet the market’s minimum.
  • Leverage must be above zero and within the market’s maximum, and the position must stay under the market’s per-position and per-trader exposure and collateral caps.
  • Each wallet can hold a limited number of separate position buckets per market (between 1 and 5, set per market). Same-direction Full opens merge instead of adding a new bucket.

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Closing a position

When you close, the pool reads the current price, computes your position value, applies the current psi adjustment, and deducts the close fee. The remaining amount is the collateral owed to you — see Claiming your settlement below. Partial closes are supported: you can release a chosen portion of the position. A partial close can be upgraded to a full close if the remaining position would be too small, and the total payout is capped by the pool’s available collateral. Close actions can include optional execution guards, such as minimum payout or oracle price bounds. These guards check the contract’s execution-time oracle price and pool calculation, not the last UI value you saw before signing.

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Claiming your settlement

For ordinary (non-cross-margin) positions, the collateral owed from a close is not sent to your wallet automatically. The pool holds it in settlement escrow, and you (or the app on your behalf) must send a separate claimSettlement transaction to withdraw it. The same applies to the owner’s share after a liquidation. Cross-margin positions are the exception: their proceeds are credited directly to your margin account, with no separate claim step.

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Position modes

Price markets support position modes:
  • Separate opens an independent position.
  • Full merges same-direction opens into one long or short bucket for your wallet.
  • CrossSeparate and CrossFull use a user-owned margin account when the market and app support account trading.
Merged positions can have an effective entry price and leverage that change after adding to the same direction. See Position modes & margin accounts for cross-margin and account-level details.

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Managing an open position

You can adjust a position without fully closing it:
  • Add margin: deposit more collateral into an existing position. This lowers its leverage and improves its health. (Adding margin is exempt from the minimum-open-collateral check.)
  • Reduce leverage: lower a position’s leverage in place. This does not pay collateral back to your wallet — the collateral stays in the position, and only the close fee on the reduced portion is taken. Use it to de-risk without closing.

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Market states

A market can be put into a restricted state by its guardian or risk roles:
  • Paused — all trading is halted: you cannot open, close, add or remove collateral and liquidity, reduce, or even liquidate. The one thing you can still do is claimSettlement to withdraw collateral you were already owed. Funding does not accrue while paused, and the paused interval is not billed when the market unpauses.
  • Reduce-only — new risk is blocked (you cannot open or increase a position, or add liquidity), but risk-reducing actions stay available: close, reduce leverage, add margin, remove liquidity, and liquidation.
Pause and reduce-only are independent — a market can be in either, both, or neither, and unpausing does not automatically clear reduce-only.

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What psi means

Psi is a pool-level solvency adjustment. It scales position payouts so the pool can stay solvent when aggregate claims and available collateral diverge. You do not choose psi, and it is not a fee. It is part of how the pool accounts for many long and short positions sharing one collateral base.

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Fees and discounts

Price trades can include:
  • a base trading fee
  • a dynamic imbalance adjustment
  • an optional vTACO-based fee discount
Fees apply on open and close. Liquidation does not use the same normal close fee path.