Opinion: The practicality of liquidation heatmaps is vastly overestimated, and they should not play a major role in trading systems.

Benson Sun, founder of Coinkarma, says the practical value of liquidation heatmaps is vastly overestimated. Many traders now spot a large cluster of liquidations at a certain price level and immediately interpret it as "the price will definitely go to sweep this area". However, liquidation charts themselves rely heavily on assumptions. Most liquidation heatmaps work by taking historical market trading data and plugging in a set of hypothetical leverage multiples—such as 5x, 10x, 20x, 30x, and 50x—to reverse-engineer the price levels where those positions "might" be liquidated after trading. As a result, the dense liquidation zones users see do not actually represent an identical number of positions waiting to be liquidated there; too many variables are at play. Those traders may have already exited their positions. Some may add to their positions, some may reduce them, and others may top up margin. As long as position size, margin, or average cost changes, the liquidation heatmap shifts. The longer the time frame, the larger this error becomes. Therefore, the most useful window for liquidation heatmaps is roughly the last 24 hours to 3 days. Using liquidation clusters from 7 days, 30 days, or even months ago as current "magnet price levels" is meaningless. Liquidation heatmaps can serve as auxiliary information for short-term market structure analysis, but they should not play a major role in a trading system, as they easily create a false sense of certainty. There will always be liquidation clusters above and below the price. When prices rise, it is said they will first sweep the short positions above; when prices fall, it is said they will first sweep the long positions below; if prices fall first then rise, it is said they will first sweep longs then shorts. In any case, there is an after-the-fact explanation, and it is hard to falsify beforehand—this makes it not an analytical tool, but pure pseudoscience.