How to trade perps on fomo

Read this first

Who cannot use perps. U.S. Persons: anyone resident in the US, US citizens and green-card holders anywhere in the world, and US entities, plus anyone accessing from inside the US. fomo may restrict other countries too. The first perps trade asks you to attest that you are not a U.S. Person, and using a VPN to get around this is a material breach of the terms (section 10). Details: is fomo available in the US.

What can go wrong, in fomo’s own words from its risk article:

• Leverage amplifies losses: “A 10x leveraged position that moves 5% against you results in a 50% loss of your margin.”
• Liquidation is automatic and final: the margin behind that position is “permanently lost”.
• Funding is charged every hour you hold a position, so a position can look profitable on price and still lose money.
• Liquidation and stop losses trigger on the mark price, not the chart price, so they can fire when the chart shows something else.
• In fast markets, prices can gap past your stop loss entirely.
• Perps run on Hyperliquid, a third-party protocol with its own downtime and bug risk.

fomo’s advice is “Only trade with money you can afford to lose entirely.” We agree, and would add: start with 1x or 2x, or not at all.

The words you need

Term	Plain meaning
Perp	A contract that tracks an asset’s price, with no expiry. You never own the asset.
Long / short	Long profits if the price rises; short profits if it falls.
Leverage	Controlling a bigger position than your money. At 10x, 100 USDC controls 1,000 USDC.
Margin	The USDC you put up. Initial margin opens the trade; maintenance margin is the floor that keeps it open.
Liquidation	The forced close when your margin falls below the floor.
Funding	Hourly payments between longs and shorts that keep the perp near the real price.
Mark price	The reference price for liquidation and stops: an oracle price from major exchanges blended with Hyperliquid trading.
Isolated / cross	Isolated (the default) risks only that position’s margin. Cross shares your whole perps balance, so more can be lost.

Leverage in numbers

All figures are fomo’s own examples from its leverage and margin articles.

Position	Move against you	What happens
1,000 USDC at 10x (100 USDC margin)	5%	You lose 50 USDC, half your margin
BTC at 40x	About 1.25%	Liquidated
BTC at 5x	About 18.75%	Liquidated
5x on a market whose maximum is 5x	About 10%	Liquidated

The maximum leverage depends on the market: BTC up to 40x, ETH up to 25x, SOL up to 20x, most others 3x, 5x or 10x. Maintenance margin is half the initial margin at the market’s maximum leverage, which is why the same 5x is safer on BTC than on a 5x-cap market.

Step by step

1. Fund your perps balance. Mobile: Portfolio tab, tap your Cash balance, Transfer cash. Web: Transfer next to Total cash. Make sure the sheet reads “Tokens to Perps” (tap Switch if not). Minimum 5 USDC. There is no fomo fee on this transfer, and fomo pays Hyperliquid’s 1 USDC account-creation fee on your first one.
2. Pick a market from the Perps tab. On 4 November 2026 fomo listed 179 crypto markets, 101 stocks, 9 commodities, 5 indices, 3 currency pairs and 2 pre-IPO companies.
3. Choose long or short.
4. Set leverage in whole numbers, up to that market’s cap. Lower leaves more room before liquidation.
5. Enter the size. Minimum position: 15 USDC notional (the full leveraged size).
6. Check the order screen: estimated liquidation price, fill price, fee and margin used (tap the details row on mobile; under the button on web). Check the order type reads Market if that is what you want, because the app remembers your last choice.
7. Place it. There is no separate confirm screen: on mobile you slide Long or Short; on the web one click places it.
8. Set a stop loss on the open position (pencil icon, Edit SL/TP). A stop set inside your liquidation price closes the trade before liquidation; the app warns if a stop sits beyond it, because it would never fire.

Order types

• Market fills now at the best available price. You can attach take profit and stop loss at entry.
• Limit waits for your price and has no expiry. The margin it needs is reserved while it rests.
• TWAP splits one order into smaller market orders over 5 minutes to 7 days, with a higher minimum. fomo charges no fee of its own on a TWAP.

When a stop loss or take profit triggers, it fills as a market order with a built-in 10% slippage tolerance, so the fill can be noticeably worse than the trigger in a fast market.

What it costs

fomo’s headline rule: up to 0.05% of the position size per trade, charged on open and on close, plus Hyperliquid’s own fee, which is also a percentage of the full leveraged size. Funding is a separate, hourly cost. The exact rate is shown on the order screen before you trade. For the full schedule and what it comes to at your size, see fomo fees; for what fomo actually earns on perps, measured from Hyperliquid’s public data, see the perps bench.

One trap: the PnL shown on a closed perps position includes funding but not trading fees, so your closed positions add up to more than your perps balance actually changed. See fomo PnL explained.

Getting money back out

Transfer from perps back to tokens (minimum 2 USDC; only the available margin, not margin locked in open positions or resting limit orders), then withdraw from your token cash balance as usual. There is no direct withdrawal from perps. See how to withdraw from fomo.

JomoBench is unofficial. We do not recommend any market, direction or leverage.