What Every Market on Liquid Actually Is

A perpetual future ("perp") lets you trade the price of an asset without ever owning it and without an expiry date. You go long if you think the price rises, short if you think it falls, and you can use leverage to size up.

The mechanics are the same across every market on Liquid: pick a side, set your size and leverage, place the order. But what drives the price, and what you should actually be watching, changes a lot depending on what you're trading. Below is a beginner's guide to each.

The one thing that's the same everywhere: funding

Before the differences, the shared piece. Because a perp never expires, there has to be something pulling its price back in line with the real price of the underlying asset. That's the funding rate. If more traders are long, longs pay shorts. Holding a long costs you a little over time. If more traders are short, shorts pay longs.

You don't do anything to make this happen — it's automatic. Just know that holding a position for a long time has a small running cost (or credit) and that's funding. It matters more the longer you hold.

Crypto perps

A crypto perp tracks the price of a coin like Bitcoin without you ever holding the coin itself.

What moves the price: Crypto trades 24/7 and reacts to everything — macro news, big liquidations, social sentiment, ETF flows, whatever Bitcoin is doing that day. It's the most volatile category here.

What's different for beginners is that the market never closes, so a position can move overnight. Volatility is high, which means leverage cuts both ways faster than anywhere else. A small move against you at high leverage can liquidate you.

Stock (equity) perps

A stock perp lets you trade the price of a company's shares without buying the actual stock. You're betting on which way the share price moves, with leverage if you want it. It also means you can trade the price even when the real stock market is closed.

What moves the price: Company-specific news such as earnings, product launches, and analyst upgrades, as well as the broader stock market mood.

Stocks have market hours, so the underlying company's shares trade roughly from 9:30am–4:00pm ET on weekdays. Big news often hits outside those hours, so prices can gap when the market reopens.

Commodity perps

A commodity perp lets you trade the price of something like gold or oil without ever touching the physical thing. You're trading the price purely as a number, long or short, with leverage.

What moves the price: Big-picture forces such as supply and demand, geopolitics, the strength of the US dollar, and inflation expectations. Oil reacts to OPEC decisions and conflicts; gold tends to rise when people are nervous and seeking safety.

This is usually a "macro" trade, meaning that you're betting on a theme rather than a single company's news. Gold in particular often moves opposite to risk assets like stocks and crypto. When markets panic, gold frequently catches a bid.

These are good for expressing a view on the world rather than reacting to a single headline.

Forex perps

A forex perp lets you trade the exchange rate between two currencies, and crucially, you're trading as a pair. EUR/USD isn't "the euro," it's the euro versus the dollar. Going long EUR/USD means you're betting the euro strengthens against the dollar; going short means the opposite. You never hold actual currency; you're just trading which way the rate moves.

What moves it: Interest rates and central bank policy, above all. A currency pair is a bet on one country's economy relative to another's.

Individual moves are usually small in percentage terms compared to crypto, which is why forex is often traded with higher leverage. That also means liquidation can come from what looks like a tiny move. In addition, central bank meetings (the Fed, ECB, Bank of Japan) are the big scheduled events. It is important to know that forex is heavily driven by scheduled data releases like job reports and rate decisions, and the price can jump hard the second those numbers come out.

Predictions

This one works differently from everything above. A prediction market isn't tracking a continuous asset price — it's tracking the probability of an event (e.g., an election outcome or a sports result).

The price represents an implied probability, usually shown between 0 and 1. A price of 0.65 means the market thinks there's roughly a 65% chance the event happens. These resolve to a fixed outcome, so at the end, the event either happened or didn't and the market settles accordingly. That's very different from a stock or crypto perp, which just keeps trading. Also, there's no leverage on predictions. You're buying a probability, not a leveraged price exposure.

Think in terms of "is the market's probability wrong?" rather than "is the price going up?" If you believe an event is more likely than the current price implies, that's your edge.

The bottom line

Everything on Liquid uses the same order ticket — long or short, set your size, place a trade. What changes is what you're watching: a Fed meeting for forex, an earnings date for stocks, OPEC for oil, an event outcome for predictions.

The best way to get a feel for how each market behaves without risking anything? Paper trade it. You can practice on live prices with simulated money, see how each market moves, and build intuition before putting real capital on the line.