Trading
A practical guide to trading on Bazaar. Plain language first; every section links to the technical chapter that governs it.
Getting in
- Fund: hold USDC on Arbitrum. That's the only collateral — no ETH needed if you use a gasless relayer, and even the USDC approval can ride a permit signature.
- Deposit:
depositCollateralinto the specific market you want to trade (min $5). Collateral is per-market; a blowup in one market cannot touch your balance in another. While you hold a position you must keepmax(0.5% of notional, $5)in collateral — $5 on a $100 position, $500 on a $100k one. Fees come out of your balance, so this guarantees you can always pay the one that closes your position; without it, a position deep enough in profit could withdraw its whole deposit and then find its closing orders silently canceled. - Trade: place orders. You hold one net position per market — buying 2 ETH long then selling 3 flips you to 1 short.
Order types, practically
| You want to… | Use | Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Fill now at market | Market | fills against resting limits at up to your slippage cap (max 5%); lives ~3 seconds; one at a time |
| Rest at your price | Limit | sits on the book until filled, canceled, or expired (up to ~1 year); postOnly guarantees you're the maker |
| Enter on a breakout | StopLimit | arms when price crosses your trigger, then acts as a limit |
| Lock in profit | TakeProfit | reduce-only limit against your position; one per position |
| Cap your loss | StopLoss | reduce-only market-style close when price crosses your trigger; one per position |
Minimum order: $5 notional (closing your whole position is always allowed). Stops trigger on the oracle price of the batch, so a sequencer can't fire your stop early.
Leverage & staying solvent
- Your maximum leverage is dynamic — up to 25× in calm, well-capitalized markets, less in volatile ones, at most 5× in a market's first days, and a third less on stocks/FX (non-24/7 markets carry a 1.5× margin multiplier). The current requirement is on-chain (
BazaarPairLens.checkBucketSolvency). - Initial margin gates new orders and withdrawals, counted against your worst case (position + everything resting). Maintenance margin is half of initial — below it, anyone may liquidate you.
- Rising margin requirements give existing positions a 24-hour grace; falling ones help you immediately. See Margin & Leverage.
- Funding accrues continuously, capped at ±0.5%/hour: longs pay shorts when the market trades above index, and vice versa. It settles when you close. See Funding.
What can happen to you
Honest list, in increasing order of severity:
- Your order auto-cancels. If your equity drifts below what a fill would require, the match cancels your order instead of filling it. Resubmit after topping up.
- Liquidation. Below maintenance margin, your position is closed entirely (no partials) and your remaining collateral is seized. Set stops, or watch
checkBucketSolvency. See Liquidations. - Auto-deleveraging (ADL). In a crisis, the most profitable, most leveraged traders on the winning side can be force-closed at a worse-than-market (but never loss-making) price to keep the market solvent. If you're up big with high leverage during chaos, you're first in line. See Auto-Deleveraging.
- Market termination. If the underlying dies (delisting, feed decommission), the market cash-settles at a final price and you withdraw. Your deposit minus your own losses is always reserved for you and never expires; if there isn't enough left to pay every winner's profit, profits are haircut at one uniform percentage — never race-to-exit. You don't need to act during the wind-down: bots are paid to settle positions on your behalf, and
getTerminalEntitlementon the lens shows exactly what a withdrawal will pay you. See Termination.
Fees you'll pay
Roughly: fractions of a basis point plus $0.03 per side. Makers pay ~1 bp all-in; takers pay a utilization-priced sequencer fee (0.75–3.75 bp) plus an insurance fee that rises when the market's backstop is thin — and closing risk is always cheaper than opening it. Exact table: Fees.
Stocks & FX after hours
Non-24/7 markets keep trading on the last price when their venue closes: margin requirement doubles for new fills, prices are boxed to ±10% of the last print, and market orders are disabled until the venue reopens. See Price Oracle.
Getting out
withdrawCollateral any time your equity covers initial margin on what remains — valued conservatively at the pessimistic edge of the oracle's confidence band. Flat (no position, no orders)? Withdraw everything, any time. Two freezes to know about: if you hold a position, withdrawals are blocked for as long as ADL remains pending (until the crisis clears or the 24-hour ADL timeout winds the market down — the 10-minute clock is only the auction's score decay); and all withdrawals pause during the 48-hour settlement window just before a dying market settles (that pause is what guarantees everyone is paid from the same, fully-tallied pot).