Why nobody honest hands you a number
A leverage number is a claim about your account size, your drawdown tolerance, the market you are in and the trader you copy — all at once. The person on a forum typing a number knows none of those things about you. This page will not pretend to either. What it can do is give you the three questions that produce your number, which is the only one that matters.
What leverage actually buys
Leverage buys size — more notional exposure per dollar of margin. Everything else about it is a consequence of that purchase. Bigger notional means every price move is amplified in both directions. It means funding payments on perpetuals, which are charged on notional, scale up with it. And it means the liquidation price moves closer to your entry, because a smaller adverse move now exhausts the same margin.
Said plainly: leverage is how close to liquidation you choose to live. The mechanics — margin, collateral, liquidation — are built up from a simple example in Crypto Leverage Trading 101: Margin, Collateral & Liquidation Explained (10:12).
The three questions that replace the magic number
1. How far away is liquidation at this leverage? The relationship is roughly inverse: the higher the leverage, the smaller the adverse move that ends the position. Ask it concretely — at the leverage you are considering, would an ordinary bad day in this market put the position at risk, or would it take something historic? Ordinary bad days happen weekly. Historic ones happen too.
2. What drawdown can you actually sit through? Not in the abstract — in the version where it is your account, red, for weeks. Leverage multiplies the depth of every drawdown. If you already know your quitting point is shallow, high leverage guarantees you will meet it. The relationship between drawdowns and quitting is most of why copy traders lose money.
3. Would you use this trader’s leverage yourself? In copy trading you do not pick leverage per trade — you inherit the trader’s, unless something caps it. Read their average leverage the way you would read their temperament, as described in how to choose a trader to copy. If their number is one you would never trade at manually, either skip the trader or set a ceiling below it.
In copy trading, the answer is a ceiling, not a setting
Trading your own account, leverage is a decision you make each time. Copying, it is a decision made for you by every trade you did not place — which is why the useful form of the answer is a maximum: a line the copied positions cannot cross, whatever the trader does. How a ceiling behaves, and what it costs you on the upside, is covered in adjusting leverage when copy trading. In CopyFi it is one block among the rules — see the strategy builder.
And whatever number your three answers produce: run it on paper first. The testnet executes the same logic against live prices with nothing at risk, which makes it the cheapest place ever built to discover your ceiling was too high.
Common questions
Is lower leverage always safer?
Per position, mostly yes: lower leverage puts liquidation further from the entry and slows how fast funding and fees consume margin. But leverage says nothing about how many positions are open at once or how correlated they are — five low-leverage positions on the same move can carry more risk than one moderate position. Leverage is one bound; portfolio rules are the others.
Does 1x leverage mean I cannot be liquidated?
On perpetuals, 1x with isolated margin puts liquidation very far away, but not at infinity — fees and funding still erode margin over time, and extreme moves exist. Treat 1x as the calm end of a spectrum, not as a guarantee.
Should I just use the same leverage as the trader I copy?
That is the default you inherit if you do nothing, and it is the right answer only by coincidence. Their leverage was chosen for their account size, their tolerance and their ability to watch the position. If you would not use that number trading manually, there is no reason it becomes right because someone else picked it.
Where do I see what leverage a trader actually uses?
On their stats. Average leverage is one of the numbers worth reading before copying anyone — alongside drawdown and trade duration. How to read that page properly is covered in the guide on choosing a trader.
Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Nothing here is a recommendation of any leverage level; leveraged trading can lose money rapidly, past performance does not guarantee future results, and CopyFi makes no investment recommendations — see the risk disclosure.