Anyone getting involved with leveraged trading must assume upon themselves the risks associated with the potentially highly rewarding practice. A recent event should remind traders that, sometimes, even when the trade goes your way, you can still take a hit. Okex socialized one trader’s massive loss on BTC futures with a clawback.
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Forced Liquidation
Okex, the Chinese-run cryptocurrency exchange based in Hong Kong, has announced on Friday that “an enormous long position” in BTC0928 futures contract was force-liquidated on July 31, 2018. And due to the sheer size of the order, worth over $400 million, the uncovered loss (about $9 million) will need to be socialized with a clawback.
According to the venue’s societal loss risk management mechanism, when the insurance fund cannot cover the total margin call losses, a full account clawback occurs. In such case, users who have a net profit across all three contracts for that week will be subject to the clawback. “We will take a portion of the profit in equal percentage from all profited traders only to cover the difference between the liquidated price and settled price.”
Incident Report
Detailing the incident, the exchange wrote that: “client with user ID 2051247 initiated an unusually large long position order (4168515 contracts) at 2am on July 31 (HKT) and triggered our risk management alert system. Our risk management team immediately contacted the client, requesting the client several times to partially close the positions to reduce the overall market risks. However, the client refused to cooperate, which lead to our decision of freezing the client’s account to prevent further positions increasing. Shortly after this preemptive action, unfortunately, the BTC price tumbled, causing the liquidation
