A complete guide to Cross Margin trading on Bybit

Margin trading on Bybit lets you use assets as collateral to open positions larger than your balance with leverage. Bybit's Unified Trading Account (UTA) offers three margin modes — Isolated Margin, Cross Margin and Portfolio Margin — each built for different risk profiles and trading strategies.

One structural constraint applies across all three modes: the selected margin mode applies to your entire account. You cannot run different modes across individual trading pairs, meaning that every open position operates under the same margin logic.

Cross Margin is the default mode and the most commonly used by traders. This article explains how Cross Margin works, how it compares to the other two modes and how to earn with it on Bybit.

Key Takeaways:

• Cross Margin is a margin trading mode that pools all your account collateral across every open position, giving you multi-asset flexibility and PnL offsetting options that Isolated Margin cannot provide.

• Because liquidation under Cross Margin triggers at the account level, not the position level, a loss on one trade can reduce the margin for all other positions and increase the risk of a cascade of liquidations.

What is Cross Margin?

Margin trading lets you borrow funds against your collateral to take positions beyond your wallet balance. It can equally amplify both potential gains and losses.

Cross Margin is the UTA's default mode. It’s suitable for experienced crypto traders who use margin as a hedging tool, or who actively trade across multiple product types within a single account.

Under Cross Margin, all eligible collateral in your account is pooled and shared across every open position. It runs under Multiple-Assets mode, meaning that holdings in different coins — e.g., Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) — are valued based on their collateral value and aggregated into a single margin balance. For instance, you can hold BTC and use its collateral value to trade Tether (USDT) Perpetual contracts without needing to convert the asset first.

Unrealized profits from Perpetual and Futures contracts count toward your margin balance, and can be used to open new positions, increasing capital efficiency. However, if you have open trades and the market moves against them, losses are deducted from the same shared collateral pool, which can quickly reduce available margin and increase the risk of forced liquidation across multiple positions.

Cross Margin supports Spot Margin trading and borrowing. If your settlement coin balance is insufficient, you can still place an order as long as your total collateral value in USD equivalent covers the requirement. This may incur a liability on that asset after execution. Leverage can be set independently for each trading pair, except in Hedge mode, where the long and short directions on the same pair must use identical leverage.

How to earn with Cross Margin trading on Bybit

You can open long or short positions under Cross Margin using Limit, Market or Conditional orders, depending upon your execution preference.

Buy long (bullish)

When you expect the price of an asset to rise, you can borrow the quote currency, buy the base asset at the current price and sell when the asset’s price reaches your target price. After selling, you repay the borrowed amount plus accrued interest; the remaining difference is your profit.

Example: Long BTC/USDT: borrow USDT, buy BTC low, sell BTC high, repay USDT plus interest and keep the spread. The wider the gap between entry and exit price, the larger your realized gain.

Sell short (bearish)

When you expect the asset’s price to fall, you borrow the base asset, sell it immediately at the current market price, wait for the decline and buy it back at the lower price. After repaying the borrowed amount plus interest, the price difference is your profit.

Example: Short BTC/USDT: borrow BTC, sell BTC high, buy it back low, repay BTC plus interest and keep the spread. The steeper the price drop, the greater your return.

Unlike Isolated Margin, Cross Margin lets you simultaneously use all positions in your account as collateral. If you hold a full BTC position and want to long ETH, you can use BTC as collateral and borrow USDT to fund the ETH trade without selling your BTC.

Understanding account risk in Cross Margin

Cross Margin replaces per-position liquidation logic with two account-level risk metrics: initial margin rate (IMR) and maintenance margin rate (MMR).

Liquidation is triggered when your account MMR reaches 100% — not when any individual position hits a liquidation threshold. This is in direct contrast to Isolated Margin, whereby liquidation fires the moment the mark price crosses a specific position's liquidation price. 

In Cross Margin, a profitable position can temporarily offset an underwater one, but if the aggregate MMR hits 100%, then all positions may be liquidated, increasing the risk and your potential amount of loss.

The liquidation price displayed on the trading interface under Cross Margin is an estimate only. Because the actual trigger is the account-wide MMR — which shifts continually with collateral values, unrealized PnL and active borrowings — that displayed figure is a directional reference, not a hard threshold. 

For full liquidation sequencing mechanics, refer to the guide titled Liquidation Process (Unified Trading Account).

How Cross Margin compares to Isolated Margin and Portfolio Margin

The three UTA margin modes share the same account infrastructure. However, they diverge sharply in margin calculation method, product access and liquidation mechanics. Your mode selection determines which collateral you can deploy, whether PnL offsets across positions and whether borrowings are available at all. As such, the choice of your preferred margin mode is the single most consequential account-level setting in UTA.

The table below summarizes the main characteristics and differences of the three margin modes.

How to switch to or from Cross Margin

You can switch margin modes from within your UTA page. The switch immediately applies to your entire account. Certain conditions must be satisfied before the switch is permitted, such as sufficient margin coverage, no conflicting position configurations and, when switching away from Cross Margin, the absence of existing borrowings and active Spot Margin orders. For the complete switching requirements in each direction, refer to the Criteria for Switching Between Margin Modes section in this guide.

Risks to note when margin trading

Always keep in mind that margin trading and leverage amplify gains and losses equally. As such, position sizing and risk assessment matter more under margin trading than in unleveraged Spot trades. 

It’s important that you monitor open positions in real time. Also, actively use take profit (TP) and stop loss (SL) orders to define your exit parameters before volatility and unexpected trend reversals hit your overall position hard.

Using unrealized profits to open new positions increases capital efficiency. However, it also compounds account-wide exposure. If the market reverses, the unrealized gains funding those new positions evaporate — collapsing your margin balance from multiple directions at once. 

Remember: the margin mode you select applies to your entire account, not individual positions. Therefore, a loss in one position under Cross Margin reduces your collateral for all other ones.

The bottom line

Cross Margin is Bybit's default UTA mode, as well as its most operationally flexible. It offers multi-asset collateral, borrowings and PnL offsetting across positions within a single account. For experienced traders who are simultaneously running hedged strategies or trading across Spot, Perpetuals and/or Futures, Cross Margin mode provides capital efficiency that Isolated Margin structurally cannot match.

Conversely, traders relatively new to leverage may find Isolated Margin's per-position loss cap a more appropriate starting point to contain the damage from any single poor trade. On the other hand, professionals managing complex derivatives strategies with correlated hedges may ultimately benefit the most from Portfolio Margin's risk calculation adjustment. 

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