Funding screener scenarios: four cases and the thresholds for each

Funding is a periodic payment between longs and shorts on perpetual futures. The sign says who pays, the size says how much: a positive rate means longs pay, a negative one means shorts do. Price direction does not follow from the rate, but the rate does show which side of the market is crowded and what holding a position costs it. Below are the four scenarios in the funding screener form: which thresholds to set, what the alert says, and where the scenario stops working.

If the term is new to you, start with “What the funding rate is”. What the screener counts as an event, and what exactly lands in the alert, is covered in the article about the funding screener.

In short

The funding screener has no interval setting: it compares the rate with the previous minute and alerts the moment your threshold is crossed.
A threshold is measured against the venue’s raw rate for its own settlement interval — 0.05% on an 8-hour pair and on an hourly one are different things.
A negative threshold is entered as a magnitude: 0.05 means an alert once the rate drops below −0.05%.
The cross-exchange gap is the only scenario where rates are converted to a common 8-hour basis.

Scenario 1: longs are overpaying to hold

The rate has gone deep into positive territory: leveraged buyers clearly outnumber sellers and pay shorts at every settlement. This is a positioning imbalance, not a forecast of a drop — funding like this can hold for weeks while the market keeps rising.

Which threshold to set, and why that one

The “high positive funding” scenario with a threshold in percent; switching it on fills in 0.05. A yardstick: the 8-hour rate on large coins usually sits around 0.01%, roughly 11% annualized, while 0.05% per settlement is already about 55% annualized. The screener prints an “annualized at the current rate” line in the alert itself, so there is nothing to recompute.

How to read the alert you get

The alert is assembled from blocks, one per exchange where the condition fired. A block carries the current rate, its annualized equivalent, a line naming the scenario that fired, and the previous rate, which shows whether the rate reached the threshold gradually or in a jump. Below that comes the 24-hour price range, and for the most liquid pairs the long / short ratio.

How the screener helps

The funding rate moves on every pair on every venue, and checking “where it has gone far from zero” by hand means opening dozens of pages. The funding screener checks perpetual contracts across 9 exchanges every minute and sends a push or Telegram alert when a rate crosses your threshold, flips sign, or diverges between exchanges. You do not pick the coin in advance.

Open the funding screener

Scenario 2: shorts are paying longs

Deeply negative funding is the mirror image: sellers are crowded, and every settlement costs them money.

How to set the threshold

The negative threshold is entered as a magnitude, without a minus: 0.05 means an alert once the rate drops below −0.05%. Switching the scenario on fills in the same 0.05, and the minimum accepted value is 0.001. The scenarios are independent: you can switch both the positive and the negative threshold on and get alerts both ways.

What it means

When many shorts are open with leverage, a rising price forces some of them to close — that is, to buy, and the cascade feeds itself. A negative rate shows that the conditions for such a cascade exist, but not whether it will happen, or when.

What actually happens

Most often the rate simply drifts back to zero: shorts close gradually, or the perpetual converges with spot without a notable move. Negative funding can also last for weeks — for instance when the perpetual is used to hedge coins bought on spot. It is a state of the market, not a timer.

What to check alongside

Open interest: rising means shorts keep building, falling means they are already closing. How to catch that with an alert is in the open interest scenarios.
The pair’s turnover: on a thin market the rate jumps on a handful of large positions.
The rate on other venues: does it agree, or is this one exchange’s quirk?

Scenario 3: the rate flips sign

Funding has crossed zero: the other side is paying now. The balance of positions on the perpetual has changed, and holding a position against the new balance has started to cost something. In the alert this is its own line — “funding direction changed to positive” or “to negative” — next to the previous rate.

Wobble around zero is filtered out in advance

On a thin pair the sign of a near-zero rate changes almost every minute, and without protection the scenario would be a noise generator. So the screener has a built-in floor: a move like −0.000001% → +0.000001% is not counted as a flip under any settings. Your own threshold can only raise that floor — which is what the field hint says: from 0.002 (built-in floor, not prefilled)%.

Which threshold makes sense

The threshold sets how large the new rate has to be for the crossing to count as an event. The point is that crossing zero matters less than the conviction behind the new balance: a rate that goes straight to a clearly negative value says more than one left hanging at zero. A detail worth knowing: your threshold is compared with the venue’s raw rate, while the built-in floor is compared with the rate converted to the 8-hour basis, so on an hourly-settlement venue the floor is equally strict in economic terms.

A rate of exactly zero is not a flip: at zero funding there is no sign, and issuing an alert on it would mean inventing an event.

Scenario 4: rates diverge between exchanges

Each exchange computes funding from its own market, so rates on the same coin can differ a lot. A wide gap shows that traders on different venues are positioned differently, and that holding the same side is cheaper on one exchange than on another.

What it takes and what it needs

The “funding spread between exchanges” scenario and a minimum difference in percent; switching it on fills in 0.04. The gap is measured between the highest and the lowest rate on the pair, so it needs at least two of your exchanges with data on that pair: on a coin you trade on a single venue the scenario stays silent by construction.

Here rates are brought to a common basis

This is the only scenario in the screener where rates are converted to their 8-hour equivalent before being compared. Otherwise one venue’s hourly rate would be compared with another’s 8-hour rate as different figures, although the economics are identical, and the shorter-interval venue would always end up the “cheap” side. Which pairs live on which interval is visible on the funding settlement intervals page.

What the threshold does not account for

Fees on both legs, slippage, and margin held on two exchanges all come out of the rate gap — the threshold knows nothing about any of it. If the rate gap is exactly what you are after, there is a separate funding arbitrage screener with its own liquidity floors for each of the two venues; how it works is covered in a dedicated article.

The four scenarios and their fields:

Scenario	What you set	Prefilled, %
High positive funding	A positive threshold	0.05
High negative funding	A threshold as magnitude	0.05
Funding sign flip	Minimum new rate	from 0.002
Cross-exchange spread	Minimum rate difference	0.04

Why a scenario may show something other than expected

Four places where a configured threshold stops meaning what was intended.

One threshold across venues with different intervals

Absolute thresholds are measured against the venue’s raw rate — the one it publishes for its own settlement interval. A sizeable share of pairs live on a 4-hour interval, and some venues settle hourly: there 0.05% per settlement is nearly out of reach, and the scenario will stay quiet for reasons other than the absence of an imbalance.

Thin pairs with no filters

On a low-turnover pair the rate is moved by a handful of large positions, and extreme funding there reflects one participant rather than a balance of forces. The filters section has floors for minimum open interest and minimum 24-hour turnover, both in millions of dollars.

Expecting a reversal from the rate

Funding says who pays and says nothing about where price will go. A high rate can hold through an entire rally, a negative one through an entire decline. The alert marks the imbalance; what to do with it, and at what risk, is yours to decide — see the article on risk management.

A threshold that is too low

A rate near zero crosses a low threshold back and forth, and alerts on one coin arrive in a stream. You can cap the flow with the per-coin alert limit in the limits section; market-wide extremes are easier to scan as a list — on the funding extremes page.

Funding together with price and open interest

Funding shows who pays, open interest shows whether positions are being added, and price shows where the market is going. Together they describe the balance of forces more fully than any one alone:

Combination	How it is read
High funding, OI ↑, price flat	Longs are building and paying, yet nothing moves — the imbalance is accumulating
High funding, OI ↓	Longs are closing and the imbalance is easing
Funding near zero, OI ↑, price ↑	New positions open without a notable cost imbalance
Negative funding, OI ↓	Shorts are closing and the skew toward them is shrinking

These are ways to describe the balance of forces, not entry rules: each combination can end differently. One alert will not assemble such a combination — funding and OI live in different screeners. The first row of the table as a whole — a positioning skew, expensive funding for the crowded side, and OI growing while price stands still — is what the liquidation screener looks for.

Ready-made setups

These are the same sets applied with one click in the screener settings. The values below are exactly what gets filled in.

High positive funding

Rate above +0.05%

Period: 240 min.
Min. Open Interest Value: 1 M $
Min. Exchange 24h Turnover: 5 M $

Logic: funding rises above +0.05% — longs are paying shorts noticeably more than usual, and positioning is skewed to the long side. The alert marks that skew; what to do about it is your call.

Funding sign flip

Rate crosses zero

Period: 360 min.
Min. Open Interest Value: 2 M $
Min. Exchange 24h Turnover: 10 M $

Logic: funding changes sign — the paying side switches: longs used to pay, now shorts do, or the other way round. A flip counts only if the new rate is at least 0.01% in absolute terms: near zero, the sign on thin pairs flips every minute.

High negative funding

Rate below −0.05%

Period: 240 min.
Min. Open Interest Value: 1 M $
Min. Exchange 24h Turnover: 5 M $

Logic: funding drops below −0.05% — shorts are paying longs noticeably more than usual, and positioning is skewed to the short side. The alert marks that skew; what to do about it is your call.

Cross-exchange arbitrage spread

Spread ≥ 0.04% across venues

Period: 60 min.
Min. Open Interest Value: 5 M $
Min. Exchange 24h Turnover: 10 M $

Logic: the funding rate on the same pair differs across exchanges by 0.04% or more. The alert shows where the rate is higher and where it is lower; fees and different settlement times are not part of the threshold. Open interest from $5M, turnover from $10M.

Any set is a starting point, not a recommendation. Once applied the thresholds are yours: move them and the screener starts counting the new way immediately.

Funding screener scenarios FAQ

What counts as a high funding rate?

There is no universal number, because a rate is published for the venue’s own settlement interval. A yardstick: the 8-hour rate on large coins usually sits around 0.01%, roughly 11% annualized. The threshold prefilled when you switch the scenario on is 0.05% per settlement, about 55% annualized.

How do I set an alert on negative funding?

The negative threshold is entered as a magnitude, without a minus: 0.05 means an alert once the rate drops below −0.05%. The positive and negative scenarios are independent, and you can switch both on.

Why does the alert arrive once instead of all the time the rate stays high?

The screener compares the rate with the previous minute and sends the alert at the moment your threshold is crossed. While the rate stays above the threshold it does not repeat for the same coin.

Why can funding rates from different exchanges not be compared directly?

An exchange publishes the rate for its own settlement interval, and that interval is not 8 hours everywhere: a share of pairs settle every 4 hours, and some venues settle hourly. A 4-hour 0.005% and an 8-hour 0.01% are the same economics, yet as numbers they differ twofold. In the cross-exchange scenario the screener converts them to the 8-hour basis itself.

Is negative funding a sign of a coming rally?

No. A negative rate means shorts pay longs, that is, positions are skewed toward sellers. The conditions for a squeeze upward do exist, but the rate does not say whether one will happen: it can hold for weeks, for instance when the perpetual is used to hedge spot.

How is the funding screener different from the funding arbitrage screener?

The funding screener watches the rate itself: high values, sign flips, and the gap between exchanges. The arbitrage screener deals only with the rate gap on one pair between two venues, and it has its own liquidity floors for each of them.

Funding does not tell you where price will go. It shows where one side of the market is paying more than usual to hold its position, and that is enough to see which coins to look at first. Every form field is explained in the funding screener settings, the rate itself in “What the funding rate is”, and current market values on the funding rates page.