Liquidation Gravity & Deep Skew
Where liquidation fuel sits around price — near pull, deep overhangs, and the deep-skew balance read the dashboard and Magnet Board use.
The idea
Leveraged positions leave a map. Every open perp position has a liquidation price, and when many positions cluster around the same levels, those levels become fuel — pockets of forced buying or selling that price tends to interact with violently when it arrives. Athena reads the liquidation heatmap for each asset in the ~48-name universe and publishes three independent views of that map, refreshed throughout the day.
The three reads
| Read | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Near Pull | Within the actionable few percent around spot, is there more liquidation mass above or below? Reported as a signed gravity score with the heaviest nearby cluster as a target level. |
| Deep Overhang | Ignoring the noise near spot, where is the single biggest pocket of fuel in this asset’s whole ladder, how far away is it, and does it actually dominate the near-field (a dominance ratio says whether the overhang is real)? |
| Deep Skew | Over the full deep band, is the total mass above price heavier than the mass below? A single signed balance score — positive means the heavier fuel (and the “magnet”) sits above spot. |
An alignment state ties them together — when the near and deep reads agree, the picture is clean; when they conflict, the near-field signal is probably noise against a larger structure. Deep Skew has proven the most consistent of the three in live forward-testing, which is why it is the read surfaced as the Liq Skew column on the Smart Money grid and as the magnet direction on the Telegram Magnet Board.
Descriptive by design
Athena backtested and continues to forward-test these signals hard, and publishes them as market structure, not directional alpha: knowing where the fuel sits tells you where moves can accelerate and where squeezes have something to feed on — it does not by itself say when price will go there. That honest framing is deliberate (see Data & Methodology); if the ongoing forward-test ever certifies a directional edge, the framing will change with the evidence.
Where it surfaces
- Dashboard — the Liq Skew column in the Smart Money grid.
- Magnet tags — positions in the Elite Alpha book carry an up/down magnet tag when the asset sits in the cross-sectional tails of the deep-skew read.
- 🧲 Magnet Board — the Telegram digest that fuses max-pain pins, the heaviest 24h liquidation cluster, the deep-skew ratio, and the largest perp order-book wall per major, plus the board-wide deep-skew extremes (Enclave every 6 hours, Circle daily).
- MCP —
get_liquidation_gravityreturns all components for one asset or the whole universe;get_wisdom_skew_leaderboardjoins deep skew with the Wisdom rank. - ACP — the
Liquidation_Gravityoffering delivers the full signal set agent-to-agent.
Treat liquidation structure as the terrain map under your trade: a crowded position (from the positioning grid) with its fuel stacked close overhead is a very different risk than the same position with clean air above it. Fuel can sit untouched for weeks — the map shows where, never when.