I went 10x long SK Hynix on a Sunday

Wall Street had gone home for the weekend, but I had an itch I couldn’t scratch.

Chip stocks had been hammered. On Thursday 5 November, Sandisk (Nasdaq: SNDK) fell 22%, AMD (Nasdaq: AMD) lost 17%, and Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) dropped 9%.

Friday wasn’t much better.

I wanted to trade these stocks. I wanted to capitalise immediately. I wanted to get ahead of the market. But as you and I are well aware, brokers won’t let you trade on the weekend. That’s because there’s no market to trade. It’s shut.

Well… shut for the TradFi (traditional finance) crowd.

I decided, “You know what, I’m going to have a bit of a play and experiment back in the crypto world because I know I can trade ‘stocks’ on a Sunday there.”

So, I went to Hyperliquid, where the market never closes…

How a Sandisk perp works

Hyperliquid is a crypto exchange running on its own blockchain. Through builders such as trade[XYZ], it lists markets on Sandisk, Micron, SK Hynix, Cerebras, and SpaceX, plus bets on OpenAI and Anthropic before they list.

None of these are shares.

They’re perpetual futures, or “perps,” contracts that track a price using a price oracle and never expire.

You post USDC, a US dollar stablecoin, as collateral. Then you profit or lose money based on the price movement, without ever owning a slice of the underlying stock, like Sandisk (Nasdaq: SNDK).

So what keeps the perp close to the real stock?

The price feed, called an oracle, pulls in the Nasdaq price while markets are open.

Every hour, if the perp trades above it, buyers pay sellers a small amount called funding, which drags it back down.

When it trades below, sellers pay buyers. On weekends there’s no Nasdaq price, so traders set it within limits until Monday’s open drags it back…

Leverage cuts both ways

Say you put up $100 on Sandisk (Nasdaq: SNDK) at 10 times leverage, giving you $1,000 of exposure, or about 1.2 shares’ worth at Friday’s closing price of $835.

If Sandisk rises 5%, you make $50, half your stake. But if it falls by about 5%, you could lose the lot.

Hyperliquid’s buffer, the maintenance margin, is half your starting margin at maximum leverage. On these 10x markets that’s a move of roughly 5% against you.

Think Sandisk has further to fall? Hit sell instead of buy, and the same maths runs in reverse.

I wanted to experience this for myself. So I put $80 of USDC on the platform and went 10x long on the SK hynix perp (SKHY).

Getting the USDC across took minutes, and the screen showed my entry price and the point at which I’d be wiped out.

I could also set a stop-loss and take-profit by price or percentage in a couple of clicks. If the price rose, I could just drag the stop-loss higher on the chart, and it would reset.

It is miles ahead of any stockbroking platform I’ve used.

So why is a crypto exchange so much easier?

The easy answer is that it’s built for the modern investor. It’s not dealing with back-end systems, custodians, market hours, or the red tape and frustrations of TradFi.

Hyperliquid is an example of what can be built when there’s little to get in your way.

Learn it with small amounts

Of course, I’m not saying you should take your entire net worth and go 10x leveraged long on semiconductor stocks.

Typically, I’m just not that comfortable with leverage in this way. Especially when you can achieve great outcomes by simply owning the regular shares.

But this is something I think everyone should get familiar with, even if it’s just to be able to trade and invest when the “normal” market is closed.

There are trade-offs around ownership, security, and learning how it all works. But there are similar trade-offs in the TradFi market, so why not at least experiment and give it a go to understand it for yourself?

Do it under the assumption that you’ll lose it all but gain invaluable experience along the way. And then see what you can do with it by the end of the year.

I think Hyperliquid has the makings of one of the world’s great trading venues, even with no real shares in sight. There’s never been a better time to learn.

Just always remember that investing of any kind, on any platform, is risky. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.

Until next time,

Sam Volkering
Investment Director, Southbank Investment Research

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