Hyperliquid glossary

The terms you meet trading perps or tracking traders on Hyperliquid, in plain English.

Trading on Hyperliquid

Perpetual future (perp): A futures contract with no expiry date. You hold a long or short position on a coin's price with margin instead of buying the coin. Most trading on Hyperliquid is in perps.
Long and short: A long gains when the price rises; a short gains when it falls. A long/short ratio counts how many traders, or how much value, sits on each side.
Leverage: Position size divided by the margin behind it. At 10× a 10% move against you uses up the margin. Hyperliquid's maximum depends on the market.
Cross and isolated margin: Cross margin shares the account's whole balance across positions; isolated margin puts a fixed amount behind one position, so only that amount can be lost on it.
Liquidation: When losses leave too little margin, Hyperliquid closes the position. Large liquidations of known wallets are often reported as news.
Funding rate: Payments between longs and shorts that keep the perp price near the spot price. On Hyperliquid funding is paid every hour and capped at 4% an hour; when it is positive, longs pay shorts.
Maker and taker fees: A taker order fills immediately against the order book; a maker order rests on the book until someone fills it. Hyperliquid's base perp fees are 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker, lower with 14-day volume and HYPE staking.
Open interest: The total value of perp positions open in a market at one time.
Spot: Buying or selling the coin itself, without leverage. JoinEm's figures count perp trading only.
Unified account: An account whose collateral sits in spot and backs perp positions too. Its perp balance alone can look near zero while it trades, so JoinEm measures perp returns against the whole account's value.
HIP-3 markets: Perp markets deployed by builders rather than Hyperliquid itself, such as stocks, indices and commodities. A deployer stakes 500k HYPE; tickers carry the deployer's prefix, like xyz:SNDK. See HIP-3 traders.
Vault and HLP: A vault is an account others can deposit into, run by a manager. HLP is Hyperliquid's own market-making vault.

Referral codes and builder fees

Referral code: A code bound to your wallet once, which takes 4% off your Hyperliquid fees on your first $25M of volume. The referrer earns a share of the fees you pay, out of Hyperliquid's own fee, not on top of it.
Builder fee: A fee an app adds to the trades it sends to Hyperliquid for you, approved once by your wallet's signature. Hyperliquid caps it at 0.1% on perps and 1% on spot, and you can revoke the approval at any time.
Agent (API) wallet: A key that can place trades for an account but cannot withdraw. Bots and copy-trading apps trade through one.

Measuring a trader

P&L, realised and unrealised: Profit and loss. Realised P&L comes from closed positions; unrealised P&L is what open positions would make if closed at today's price. JoinEm counts both.
Time-weighted return: Growth of the account from trading alone: each step's P&L is divided by the money in the account at the time, and the steps are chained, so deposits and withdrawals don't count as gains or losses. How we compute it.
Max drawdown: The deepest fall from a high before a new high, as a share of the high. A 30% drawdown needs a 43% gain to recover.
Win rate: The share of trades that made money. On its own it says little: a trader can win 90% of trades and still lose money on the other 10%.
Profit factor: Everything won divided by everything lost. Above 2 is strong, below 1.2 is weak.
Profit per trade (expectancy): Average profit per trade as a share of the position size: what a typical trade makes after fees.
Copyable: JoinEm's rule for whether a human-speed follower could copy a trader: enough trades, holds that last long enough, not hundreds of trades a day, and no large losses left open. See the methodology.
Score: JoinEm's 0–100 description of a 90-day record against other copyable traders. A description, not a forecast: how it's built.

Kinds of traders

Whale: A wallet large enough for its trades to be watched: on JoinEm, an account of $500k or more. See ranked whales and named wallets.
Market maker: A trader, usually a bot, that quotes both sides of the book and earns the spread. Not copyable, so left out of JoinEm's rankings.
Scalper, day, swing and position trader: By average holding time: under an hour, 1–24 hours, 1–7 days, and more than a week.
Copy trading: Opening and closing the same positions as another trader, by hand or with a bot. A copy enters later and at a different price, so its results differ from the trader's. Steady picks traders by rules tested on copies.