Most strategies start with price and indicators. But markets generate other data that describes what participants are doing, not just where price is. Understanding this data unlocks conditions that go beyond a simple chart.
The four types below — liquidations, open interest, funding rates, and order flow — are just some of the biggest, most established examples. They are far from the only kind of market data that can drive a strategy. Liquid Edge is working to support many, many more data types over time, so the strategies you can build aren't limited to this list.
Liquidations#
A liquidation happens when a leveraged trader's position is force-closed by the exchange because their margin ran out. Large clusters of liquidations often mark moments of maximum pressure — a cascade of forced selling into a drop, or forced buying into a spike. Because these are involuntary, they can create sharp, short-lived moves that sometimes reverse. A strategy might watch for a liquidation spike and fade it, or wait for it to clear before entering.
Open interest#
Open interest (OI) is the total number of open futures contracts on a market. It measures how much money is currently committed, not how much is trading hands.
- Rising OI with rising price suggests new money backing the move.
- Falling OI suggests positions closing — a trend may be losing conviction.
OI adds context: the same price move means different things depending on whether positions are being opened or closed.
Funding rates#
On perpetual futures, the funding rate is a periodic payment between long and short traders that keeps the perpetual price close to the spot price.
- Positive funding — longs pay shorts; the market is leaning long.
- Negative funding — shorts pay longs; the market is leaning short.
Extreme funding signals a crowded side, which can precede a squeeze. A strategy might use funding as a regime filter — only taking longs when funding isn't already stretched, for example.
Order flow#
Order flow describes the live stream of buy and sell orders hitting the market — which side is aggressive and where large orders sit in the book. It is the most granular view of short-term supply and demand.
The sky is the limit#
Liquidations, open interest, funding, and order flow are today's examples — not the ceiling. Almost any data that describes market behavior can, in principle, be turned into a condition, wired into a strategy, and deployed as a bot that Liquid Edge executes automatically on your connected account. As more data types are integrated into the infrastructure, the range of strategies you can build and run keeps expanding.
Why this matters for Liquid Edge#
These data types are the raw material for conditions that most retail tools can't express. Combining an indicator signal with a market-data filter — "enter long on the RSI signal only if funding is neutral" — is exactly the kind of strategy Strategy Studio is built for. See Building Conditions and the Strategy Examples.