Positioning indicators in the terminal

The stats strip provides positioning context for the selected market. It does not reveal the complete positions or intentions of its participants.

Open interest

Check whether the display reports quantity or USD notional. A USD total can change with price, while every outstanding contract has both a long and short. Price and OI alone do not establish new long conviction, short covering or forced exits. Open interest also documents the unresolved unit discrepancy in the Research velocity feature.

Funding and countdown

Read the signed rate alongside the next settlement and the venue’s interval. Positive funding generally means longs pay shorts at settlement; it does not prove an impending squeeze. The funding guide connects the display with the Research rate definition.

Account ratios

An account ratio counts accounts under the source’s classification, not their notional exposure. A large number of small accounts can outweigh a few large accounts in this ratio. It does not prove which group is informed or likely to be liquidated.

A published study asks one version of this: when most of the crowd is long, what happens next? It measures the ratio over its stated markets and dates, not the exposure behind those accounts.

Liquidation totals

Displayed totals describe published forced-liquidation events received from the feed. They are not a census and cannot show that most leveraged longs or shorts are now gone. Read the publication limitations before comparing a total with open interest or a modeled heatmap.

Use them together

Record the market, timestamp, units and missing observations. Turn a proposed relationship into an explicit Research Workbench question, then inspect counts and outcomes before choosing replay cases. Use the Reading library for each frozen field’s calculation and limits.