Funding-rate "arbitrage" gets sold as free money. I tested it on 6 years of data. Last 12 months: +0.1%.
How it works: buy a coin on spot, short the same coin on futures. Price moves cancel out, and you collect the funding when longs pay shorts.
My test: 14 coins that actually have a Binance spot pair, every trade repriced at real prices, 103 trades since 2020:
• Whole period: about +7.8% a year
• 2021 alone: +27.6%
• Last 12 months: +0.1%
• 2026 so far: 2 trades
The risk wasn't the problem. Only 16 of 103 trades lost money, the worst -0.9%. The problem is opportunity: funding only stays high when everyone wants leverage. In a quiet market the strategy just sits there.
One more catch: many of the "highest funding" perps on Binance right now are tokenised stocks and gold, with no spot pair to hedge. That's not arbitrage. That's just a short.
Would you park stablecoins in something that made 27% one year and 0% the next? 👇
Not financial advice. Backtest on real prices; exchange risk not included.
#TradingBots #algoTrading #tradingfees #bitcoin $BTC
How it works: buy a coin on spot, short the same coin on futures. Price moves cancel out, and you collect the funding when longs pay shorts.
My test: 14 coins that actually have a Binance spot pair, every trade repriced at real prices, 103 trades since 2020:
• Whole period: about +7.8% a year
• 2021 alone: +27.6%
• Last 12 months: +0.1%
• 2026 so far: 2 trades
The risk wasn't the problem. Only 16 of 103 trades lost money, the worst -0.9%. The problem is opportunity: funding only stays high when everyone wants leverage. In a quiet market the strategy just sits there.
One more catch: many of the "highest funding" perps on Binance right now are tokenised stocks and gold, with no spot pair to hedge. That's not arbitrage. That's just a short.
Would you park stablecoins in something that made 27% one year and 0% the next? 👇
Not financial advice. Backtest on real prices; exchange risk not included.
#TradingBots #algoTrading #tradingfees #bitcoin $BTC
