Risk Limits

We allow trading including overnight and on weekends, when some underlier markets are closed or less liquid. For now, this may lead to lower liquidity conditions that could make the exchange less safe for users. To ensure safety, we impose some limits on positions, prices and open interest in the early days of the exchange.

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Definitions

Market Close refers to periods when major reference markets (e.g., NYSE, CME) are closed.

U.S. bank holidays are treated as normal business days for Market-Close logic.

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Leverage Limits

Example: 30× leverage requires approximately 3.33% Initial Margin.

See the Specification Index for per-symbol leverage and execution parameters.

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Position Limits

These are limits for the default margin group. Participant-specific margin groups and other risk controls may impose different limits. During Market Close:

• Position size per participant is limited to the Max Position Percentage of normal size.
• Participants exceeding this limit can only reduce exposure:
  • For long positions: only sell orders accepted.
  • For short positions: only buy orders accepted.

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Price Bands

We implement price bands to protect users against:

• their own fat finger errors;
• manipulative practices from other market participants.

For all products, buy orders above the upper band and sell orders below the lower band are rejected before reaching the matching engine. Price bands are calculated around the latest Market Data Price and are refreshed as market data updates.

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Dynamic price bands

Price-band width is dynamic: each product is assigned a market-hours preset, and the applicable width changes with that product’s current trading session. The lower and upper limits are calculated as: $$\text{lower band} = P \times (1 - f), \qquad \text{upper band} = P \times (1 + f)$$ where $P$ is the latest Market Data Price and $f$ is the session factor below. Sessions are determined from the product’s configured market calendar, including weekends; they are not a single UTC schedule shared by every product. This approach gives actively traded markets a band appropriate to their primary session while using the configured close, overnight, and weekend widths when the reference market is less liquid or closed. A product’s current bands are available in the market-data price-band response; integrations should use that live value rather than hardcoding a percentage. Price bands may be relaxed at the sole discretion of QFEX for the following reasons:

• Exceptional market volatility
• Stock splits or reverse stock split of equities

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Open Interest Limits

Once a product exceeds $10m of open interest, a participant’s potential open interest is limited to 10% of total open interest in that market. There is currently no absolute market-wide open-interest cap configured. See the Specification Index for the consolidated policy.