If one leveraged position goes wrong, what happens to the others?
Most explanations of leverage stop at the point where you open one position. The interesting behaviour starts at the second one.
If you are long one market and short another and the first goes badly, what happens to the second? The answer depends entirely on whether your positions share collateral — and on a unified margin account, they do. That is the whole design, and it is rarely spelled out before you use it.
Two ways to hold collateral
There are broadly two arrangements.
Isolated margin assigns collateral to a position. You commit some amount to a long, and that amount is the most that position can lose. If it liquidates, it liquidates alone; everything else in the account is untouched. Each position is its own sealed compartment.
Unified margin pools the collateral. Every position draws on one balance, and liquidation is assessed against the account as a whole rather than position by position.
The pooled version is more capital-efficient, and the reason is easy to state: offsetting positions stop needing separately funded margin. If you are long one asset and short a correlated one, the account's net risk is smaller than the sum of the two positions, and a unified account can recognise that. Under isolated margin you fund both compartments in full regardless.
Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets — which is how assets outside the core perp set, including equities and commodities, are traded — use the unified arrangement. BT365 treats a HIP-3 account as exactly that: one balance across markets.
The part that is a risk, not a feature
Shared collateral cuts both ways, and the downside deserves stating plainly because it surprises people.
On a unified account, a loss in one market can liquidate a position in another.
The mechanism is not exotic. Liquidation triggers when account equity falls below the maintenance requirement for everything currently open. An unrealised loss anywhere reduces account equity. So a position moving hard against you in one market lowers the equity supporting all of them, and the engine closes what it needs to close — which may include positions that were, on their own, doing fine.
This is the reason "I was right about the trade and still got liquidated" is a coherent complaint on a unified account and a confused one on isolated margin. Being right about a position is not sufficient. The account has to survive.
The practical implication is that on a unified account, position sizing is an account-level exercise. Sizing each position against its own thesis, one at a time, systematically overstates how much risk you can carry — because each new position is quietly borrowing from the buffer protecting every existing one.
Turning it on is an explicit act
One detail that matters if you are building against this rather than just trading on it.
A unified account is not the default state. Trading a HIP-3 market requires enabling unified accounting on the account first, as a distinct signed action, and an account that has not done so cannot trade those markets at all.
BT365 issues that action from the user's own wallet — the same wallet that holds the funds, signing for itself — rather than delegating to a subordinate API key. The distinction is not cosmetic. Our agents' wallets are the main accounts, so the account-level variant is the correct one; the delegated variant would be signing on behalf of an account that does not exist. It is also called defensively, both after funding and again before placing an order, because a failure to enable is not fatal on its own and is much cheaper to retry than to diagnose later.
Where the accounting gets genuinely tricky
Two bugs are worth describing, because they are the kind that produce confidently wrong numbers rather than errors — and confidently wrong numbers in balance accounting are the expensive kind.
A market-scoped balance query returns zero. The instinct, when you want to know how much collateral is behind a position in some market, is to ask about that market. On a unified account this returns zero, because the collateral is not held there — it is held at the account level. The balance has to be read from the account-wide view. Asking the narrower question does not produce a smaller answer; it produces a wrong one, and it looks exactly like an empty account.
The same collateral gets counted twice. Hyperliquid uses spot USDC as margin internally for unified accounts, and the portion locked as margin already appears inside the account-level equity figure. Add the spot balance to that equity and the locked part is counted twice. The result is an account that appears to hold more than it does — which then surfaces as phantom drift alerts and, worse, as an automatic reconciliation that over-credits realised profit against a balance that was never there.
The fix is to subtract the locked portion before adding the spot balance, which is a no-op on a non-unified account and correct on a unified one. It is a single line, and the reason it is worth an article is that both the wrong version and the right version run without error. Nothing fails. One of them is just untrue.
What to actually do with this
If you are trading on a unified account, three things follow.
Size against the account, not the position. The buffer is shared, so every position you add reduces the room every other one has to move against you.
Treat correlated positions as one exposure. Unified margin gives you capital efficiency on offsetting trades, which is genuinely useful — but the flip side is that positions correlated in the same direction concentrate risk faster than the position count suggests.
Know which mode you are in before you need to. The difference between "this position can lose its own collateral" and "this position can take the account with it" is not a detail to discover during a drawdown.
Unified margin is the better arrangement for most people running more than one position. It is not the safer one, and the platforms that describe it purely as a capital-efficiency win are telling you half of it.
BT365 runs prediction markets, perps, and spot from one self-custodial account, including Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets. Explore the platform or read the documentation.