ChainRatedFunding rates: why a signal trade melts while it waits
A signal tells you where to get in and where to get out. It never tells you how long you will be holding, and on a perpetual the holding time has a price that is charged three times a day.
On this page12 sections
What is funding, in one paragraph?
A recurring payment between traders that keeps a perpetual contract's price near the price of the thing it tracks. A perpetual has no expiry date, so it needs some force pulling it back toward the index, and funding is that force.
When the contract trades above the index, longs pay shorts. When it trades below, shorts pay longs. The exchange moves the money and takes no cut, which is why funding is a transfer rather than a fee, and why nobody sends you an invoice for it.
On most venues it settles every 8 hours, and only positions open at the settlement moment pay or receive. That last detail is the whole of this article: funding is a charge for time, and a signal never tells you how much time you are about to spend.
Why does this matter more to a follower than to a trader?
Because the follower does not choose the holding period. Someone else does, and they are not paying your funding.
A trader who opens a position decides when it has failed and when it is done. A follower who takes a published call inherits an entry, a stop and a ladder of targets, and the time it takes to reach any of them is set by the market and by the channel's exit instructions. If the call sits open for three days, the follower pays for three days, and nothing in the original message priced that in.
The gap widens with the shape of the call. Six-target ladders are the most common form in our index, at 1,259 of the 3,227 signals we have parsed as of 7 August 2026, and a ladder is an instruction to stay in the trade until the far targets arrive. Staying in is exactly the activity funding charges for.
How much does it actually cost?
Small per interval, and the small number is what hides it. In 2024, BitMEX's XBTUSD funding averaged about 0.017% per interval, which is three settlements a day.
Two multipliers turn that into something visible.
It is charged on the position, not on your margin. A 0.017% charge on a $10,000 position is $1.70 regardless of whether you put up $10,000 or $500 to hold it.
Leverage therefore multiplies the drag on your stake. At 20x, that same 0.017% is a 0.34% hit to the margin behind the position, three times a day if you hold through every settlement.
| Held for | At 1x, cost to margin | At 10x | At 20x |
|---|---|---|---|
| One settlement (8 hours) | 0.017% | 0.17% | 0.34% |
| One day (3 settlements) | 0.05% | 0.51% | 1.02% |
| Three days | 0.15% | 1.53% | 3.06% |
| One week | 0.36% | 3.57% | 7.14% |
Those figures use one venue's historical average as a stand-in. Real rates move, sometimes sharply, and the direction matters as much as the size.
What does that do to a 2% target?
It takes a share of it that grows every eight hours, and on the timescales signal calls actually run the share is not small.
Our replay scores a call against a 2% move, which is a deliberately modest target chosen because it is reachable. Set the table above beside it. At 20x, a position held three days has paid about 3% of margin in funding before the trade has done anything, against a 2% price move that the same leverage turns into roughly 40% on margin. The funding is a real bite out of a real gain rather than a rounding error.
Now take the call that does not reach its target and sits. The price has gone nowhere, the stop has not triggered, and the position is quietly losing to the clock. That state is common: 76 of our 3,167 replayed outcomes as of 7 August 2026 reached neither the take nor the stop inside a 30-day window, and those are only the ones where the arithmetic ran to the end of our window.
Why is a crowded trade the expensive one?
Because funding follows the crowd, and a broadcast signal is a machine for producing crowds.
Funding is usually positive, meaning longs usually pay shorts, and it goes more positive when the contract trades above the index, which happens when buying pressure is heavy. A call that lands on thousands of screens at once produces exactly that pressure on exactly that pair.
So the follower's position is most expensive to hold in the situation the signal itself created, and cheapest to hold when nobody cares about the pair. Nothing is being arranged against anyone here. Funding exists to make crowded positioning costly, and it is doing its job.
The same crowding shows up in execution. What happens between a message arriving and an order filling is worked through in Which order type turns a published entry into a position.
Which direction pays, and can it flip?
Longs usually pay, and it can flip, and the flip is worth understanding because it is the one time the clock runs in a follower's favour.
When the perpetual trades below the index, shorts pay longs. In a market falling hard, a long position can be receiving funding rather than paying it, which softens the cost of waiting. The reverse is the more common experience: a crowded long, in a rising market, paying three times a day while it waits for a target it may or may not reach.
None of that is predictable enough to plan around. The practical use of knowing the direction is smaller and more reliable: check the current rate before entering, because it tells you what the wait will cost at today's price of waiting.
Does the channel's record include any of this?
No, and it usually cannot, because a channel's record is computed from prices rather than from an account.
A published result of "+2%" is a statement about where price went between two numbers in a message. Funding is charged to a real position on a real venue, at a rate that differs between exchanges and moves through the day. There is no way to put it into a price-based record, which means every advertised percentage is gross of a cost that only the follower pays.
Our own replay charges fees and does not model funding, which is one of several reasons our figures describe a follower who did better than a real one. The full set of assumptions is on the Methodology page, and what a replay can and cannot establish is in What a backtest can and cannot prove.
How do you estimate the cost before entering?
Four steps, and they take about a minute on the exchange screen you are already looking at.
- Read the current funding rate for the pair. Every venue shows it on the contract page, usually with a countdown to the next settlement.
- Multiply by three for a day, by your expected holding period in days. A six-target ladder is not a one-day trade.
- Multiply by your leverage to convert the cost from a share of the position into a share of your margin.
- Compare that against the target. If waiting three days costs a meaningful fraction of the move you are waiting for, the trade is worse than the message implies, and it is worse by an amount you can compute in advance.
The fourth step is the one that changes decisions. A 2% target with a three-day expected hold at high leverage is a different proposition from the same target reached in an hour, and the message will not distinguish them.
Where does funding sit among a follower's costs?
Third, behind execution and behind the calls that were never takeable, which is worth saying plainly so this article is not read as the main event.
| Cost | When it applies | Where it is covered |
|---|---|---|
| The entry overtaken before it filled | Most common outcome in our corpus as of 7 August 2026: 1,554 of 3,167, though one channel supplies 1,197 and across the other sixteen publishers the rate is 21.9% | Half the trades never happen |
| Slippage and fees at entry and exit | Every fill, charged on the notional | Following crypto trading signals: how it actually works |
| Funding | Every settlement you hold through | This article |
Funding is the quietest of the three and the only one that grows while nothing happens.
What this does not prove
The table in this article uses one venue's 2024 average as a stand-in for a rate that moves constantly and differs between exchanges. Treat it as an order of magnitude for the shape of the arithmetic, not as a forecast of what any position will pay. Read the live rate on the venue you are using.
Funding is also not a hidden fee or a trick. It is the mechanism that makes a contract without an expiry date track the thing it is named after, and without it the instrument would not work. The point of the article is that it is a cost of time, and that a signal follower does not control the time.
Our figures describe our index as of 7 August 2026: 3,227 parsed signals, 1,259 of them carrying six targets, 3,167 replayed outcomes of which 76 resolved as neither take nor stop inside 30 days. That index is 50 channels and not a random sample of the market, and the figures move as the replay catches up.
Nothing here is financial advice, and nothing here alleges misconduct by any channel.
The practical read
Three questions turn the clock into a number before you enter rather than after.
What is the funding rate on this pair right now, and which side is paying? How long does this call expect me to hold, given how many targets it lists? And what does that holding period cost against the move I am waiting for?
Current ratings for the channels we can score are at Signal Providers.
Sources
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