Funding-rate search (carry)

Perpetual futures pay a periodic funding rate between longs and shorts to keep the perp price tethered to spot. Positive funding: longs pay shorts. Negative: shorts pay longs. The Funding mode turns that payment into a search axis — it ranks coins by how much you can earn from funding while staying delta-neutral, i.e. with no bet on which way the price goes.

This is different from the Current / Daily modes: there you trade a price spread that closes; here you hold a position for the funding income, for as long as the rate stays favourable. The spread between the two legs is just the cost of getting in.

What are the two funding strategies?

Why is everything shown as an APR?

Exchanges pay funding at different intervals — every 8h, 4h or 1h. The same 0.01% per period is eight times more income at 1h than at 8h, so every figure is normalised to an annualised rate: APR = rate × periods-per-day × 365. The headline number on each card is that APR.

How do I read a funding card?

Each card is one coin and shows BOTH ways to harvest its funding, side by side, so you can compare: ① one exchange (Spot+Perp) and ② two exchanges (Perp↔Perp). One shared capital + horizon input drives the projection for both, and each variant has its own «Watch» bookmark — you open the actual trade from the Watched tab, where the bookmarked construction shows the same card with an «Open trade» button. A variant only appears when it clears your APR filter (so some coins show just one). Here is what each element means:

Why don’t I see the huge APRs people talk about?

Mostly because 0.01% per 8h is the neutral default exchanges settle on — that is the MEDIAN coin, and it annualises to about 11%. A rate of 0.1–0.2% per period is not a low number: it is roughly ten times the baseline and sits in the top 1% of the market. Read the APR, not the per-period rate. Beyond that, the list is filtered by «Min leg volume» ($500k of 24h spot volume per leg by default). The genuinely enormous APRs live almost entirely below that floor, so lower it if you want to see them — but understand what you are opting into: a funding spike on a thin coin is the fastest kind to revert, and unwinding costs more there. That is precisely why the floor exists rather than being off by default.

• APR badge — the headline: the annualised yield you harvest RIGHT NOW, if the current funding rate held. For positive funding it is the yield you earn (green). For NEGATIVE funding the construction flips to long perp + short spot (borrow), and the badge is the HONEST net AFTER the borrow cost — so it can turn red when the borrow costs more than the funding (a trap). It changes every funding period.
• Strategy tag — Spot+Perp (one exchange) or Perp↔Perp (two exchanges).
• Construction line — exactly what to do, e.g. “Buy spot kucoin + Short perp kucoin”, or “Short perp htx + Long perp binance”. Each leg links to that exchange’s trade page.
• Funding — the raw rate per period and its interval (e.g. 0.1062% / 4h). This is what the APR is built from.
• Funding settlement — the exact next funding time on each perp leg with a live countdown, plus chips marking the recommended entry and exit windows (see “When should I enter and exit?” below).
• “fees paid off in ~N d” — how many days of funding it takes to cover the round-trip taker fees (open + close, both legs). Smaller is better.
• “entry basis …%” (Spot+Perp) — the price gap between perp and spot you cross to enter, paid once.
• Income calculator — enter your capital (per leg) and a hold horizon in days to project the funding income at the current rate, minus the round-trip taker fees on both legs. On the Watched tab it also shows your available balance per exchange (from your API keys).
• Price behaviour (24h change + volatility) — a carry is direction-neutral but not path-neutral. When the coin is moving sharply (elevated/high), the high APR is usually momentum-driven and prone to revert, and the short leg can be liquidated before the spot hedge backstops it — keep a bigger margin buffer.
• Leverage → liquidation buffer — set the leverage on the perp leg and the «Analysis» quantifies how close a swing comes to a liquidation: at L× the leg is force-closed by an adverse move of ≈100/L% (isolated margin), and the signal compares that to the coin’s recent biggest 1h move. High leverage on a volatile coin = a thin buffer, and a liquidated leg breaks the hedge into a directional loss — so it warns and raises the score. Lower the leverage to widen the buffer.
• Open trade — opens this carry as a position tracked in the Open positions tab: elapsed time, accrued funding (estimate at the entry rate), live APR vs your entry APR, fee break-even progress, and a warning if the funding flips. You close it manually whenever the yield decays — there is no convergence auto-close.
• Funding history (7d) — Mean APR and Sign stability (a compact reality-check on the badge; see below).

Negative funding — what is the borrow cost?

When funding is NEGATIVE, shorts pay longs, so the profitable side flips: you go long the perp (it now receives funding) and short the spot to stay delta-neutral. Shorting spot means borrowing the coin on margin and selling it — and that borrow charges interest. So the real yield is not the raw funding: it is funding minus the borrow rate. CryptoCline shows this honestly.

On a negative-funding card the APR badge is the NET after borrow, and a breakdown line spells it out: “funding X% − borrow Y% = net Z% APR”. When the borrow costs more than the funding pays, the net goes negative, the badge turns red, and a “trap: borrow eats the carry” tag appears — these look attractive on the raw rate but lose money. Coins the exchange will not lend (often the ones with the most extreme negative funding, precisely because nobody can arb them) are marked “not borrowable — construction can’t be built”. The income calculator and «Analysis» use the same net, so a borrow-eaten carry sinks in the ranking instead of surfacing.

When should I enter and exit?

Funding is paid at fixed settlement times (UTC-aligned, every 8h/4h/1h depending on the coin and venue), and only a position open AT a settlement collects that period. CryptoCline shows the exact next settlement time on each perp leg with a live countdown, so you can time the carry instead of leaving capital idle:

• Recommended entry — just before the leg you collect on settles (the perp for Spot+Perp; the short, higher-funding leg for Perp↔Perp), so you bank the very next payment rather than waiting a whole interval. When that settlement is under ~20 minutes away the chip turns to “enter now”.
• Recommended exit — right after a settlement you have already collected. For Perp↔Perp the two venues often settle at DIFFERENT clock times, so the chip shows the window: after you collect on the short leg, before the long leg (the one you pay on) settles.

These times appear on every tab: Opportunities and Watched cards show entry + exit, an open position shows the exit window (you are already in). Times are the exchange’s own next-settlement timestamp where published; for the few venues that don’t expose it in bulk it is computed from the interval on the UTC schedule.

Now vs the last 7 days — which APR matters?

The green badge and the “Mean APR” in the history block measure the SAME thing on two horizons: the badge is the yield right now, the Mean APR is the average over the last 7 days. Read together they tell you whether the current rate is normal for this coin or a fleeting spike.

For Perp↔Perp cards the history is the NET of both legs (short minus long), aligned hour by hour — so its Mean APR is directly comparable to the net badge. For Spot+Perp it is that single venue’s funding. “Samples” is how many hourly points back the history; it is still filling toward a full week, so new or thin coins may show only a few.

What is sign stability?

“Sign stability” is the share of the last 7 days the funding kept the same sign. High (≈80–100%) = a dependable direction you can plan around. Low (≈40–60%) = the funding flips back and forth, so today’s attractive APR is unreliable and can invert while you hold.

What if the funding flips while I hold the position?

The direction of your construction is FIXED at entry — the legs never reverse themselves. The funding sign, however, is a market variable: if it flips against you, the position that was RECEIVING funding starts PAYING it at every settlement, and it keeps paying until the rate flips back on its own or you close. A common misconception is that a reversed carry “corrects itself after one cycle — you lose the first round, then it turns positive”. It does not: that first-round-loss-then-profit shape describes FEES on a correctly-directed carry (you pay the round-trip fees at entry, then funding income crosses break-even), not a carry whose funding has inverted — an inverted carry just keeps bleeding.

The service watches this for you on every open position: the position card shows a ⚠ “funding flipped” warning, and with Telegram connected you get an alert within ~5 minutes of the flip. Positions are never closed automatically on a flip — flips are often transient and closing costs a round trip of fees — so the decision stays yours: check the 7-day history and sign stability; if the reversal looks sustained, close; if it is a one-off tick on an otherwise stable coin, it may well revert.

How do I evaluate a carry?

A solid carry usually has all of these:

• Badge APR positive AND comfortably above break-even (fees paid off in well under your intended hold).
• Mean APR (7d) also positive and not far below the badge — the yield is normal, not a one-off spike.
• Sign stability high (≈80%+) — the direction has held all week.
• Enough samples and decent liquidity — extreme APRs on thin coins evaporate fast.
• For Spot+Perp: a small entry basis, so you do not give back days of funding just getting in.

Worked example: +233% badge / +127% mean / 100% stability is a consistent earner — reliably positive all week, and a little hot right now. By contrast +297% badge with a low or negative mean, or ~40% stability, is the opposite: a transient spread likely to fade or flip.

What are the red flags?

• Badge positive but Mean APR (7d) negative or near zero → a momentary spike, not a yield.
• Low sign stability → funding keeps flipping; the carry is unreliable.
• Very high APR (hundreds of % and up) on a low-liquidity coin → usually a stressed/illiquid market that will not hold (the risk score flags many of these).
• “needs a spot short” flag (negative-funding Spot+Perp) → you must borrow the coin to short spot; harder for retail and adds borrow cost.
• Funding just flipped sign (a ⚠ flag on the card) → the 7d Mean APR and stability describe the OPPOSITE construction, so they over-state how dependable this fresh carry is; it may flip straight back.
• Few samples → the history has not accumulated yet; treat the badge with caution until it does.

Funding is an estimate of forward yield from the current rate; it changes and can flip each period. The short perp leg uses margin and can be liquidated if the position is not funded — keep a buffer. Extreme APRs (hundreds of percent and up) are usually illiquid or stressed coins. Not financial advice.