Guides and reference · Reading a sudden drop
Guide 08 of 122 min read
Reading a sudden drop
When a market falls fast: line up liquidations, whale moves and the price, and see what that can and cannot tell you.
Good for: a sell-off, to see who was forced out, who acted and in what order.
Say BTC falls 4% in ten minutes and you want to know who was forced out. Three views answer it together, on one clock: liquidations, whale moves and the price.
Start with the liquidations
A liquidation is a position the exchange closed by force because its margin ran out. The liquidations page lines them up with the price, five minutes a bar in the last hour. Longs sit above the line, shorts below. Where the whole exchange is on record, it stands as a light bar behind the tracked whales.
Then the moves
Liquidations show who was forced out. The moves page shows who acted: whales that closed, trimmed or flipped in the same minutes, each with its time. A whale that closed before the fall and one liquidated in it tell different stories.
What was waiting below
Before a fall, the walls of longs below the price show where forced selling would start. After it, the market page’s landscape shows what is left. A wall the price went through is gone.
A case on record
On 27 July 2026 one pre-market print pulled the oracle of the SK Hynix perp 18.7% lower in a minute. The oracle is the reference price the exchange uses for margin. About 960 long accounts were liquidated, by analysts’ estimates. The case file lines up the timeline with the price. There the price fell first and the liquidations followed.
What it won’t show
Liquidations during a fall don’t mean they caused all of it. Ordinary selling, news and thin order books move prices too, and they leave no liquidation mark. The views show order and size. The cause stays a question.