The Liquidations screen, explained: from raw prints to tradable levels.
Optiom Research · runnable code, tested against the live API
Liquidations are the only prints in the market that nobody chose to send: the exchange forced them. That makes them uniquely honest information. The Optiom Liquidations screen shows both the raw event feed and a price-by-time heatmap of where forced flow clustered. Here is how to use each part.
The event feed
Each row is one forced closure: side, price, quantity, notional, venue. Single prints above a few million dollars matter on their own — they mark a trapped player. Bursts of many small prints in seconds are a cascade: stops triggering stops. The feed is the same data served by the /liquidations API endpoint, timestamped to the millisecond.
The heatmap
The heatmap bins liquidation notional by price and time. Hot zones are graveyards of leverage — and the market has a memory for them: a level that liquidated many longs often becomes support on the retest, because the sellers who were forced out are gone. Use hot zones as your map of already-flushed levels versus still-crowded ones.
A simple daily routine
Once a day, note the two or three hottest zones of the last 24 hours and where price sits relative to them. Pair the screen with a server-side alert (see the Telegram alerts tutorial) on those levels, and let the cascade come to you instead of chasing it. The full analysis workflow in Python is covered in the liquidation cascades tutorial.
Run it on your own data.
Create a free account for CSV exports, then move to API access as your workflow grows.