Live cross-exchange spreads for perpetual futures

Entry, exit and the round trip

A cross-exchange spread is the price difference for the same asset between two venues at the same instant. For a delta-neutral position you pay it twice: the entry spread when you open the long leg on one exchange and the short leg on another, and the exit spread when you unwind both. Entry plus exit is the round trip — the number a funding spread must beat before the position earns anything.

• Entry now — the current taker entry spread: buy at the long venue's ask, sell at the short venue's bid. Usually negative, since it crosses both books; positive means the books are currently paying you to open in this direction.
• Round trip — average entry plus average exit over the window, at taker prices on both legs. It is the full cost of opening and closing without waiting.
• Coverage — how much of the window has data. Low coverage means a thin or newly listed market, so treat its averages with care.

Live numbers alone are misleading: spreads oscillate, and the profitable move is usually to wait for a favorable percentile rather than take the current quote. The dashboard adds p10/p90 percentiles, minimums and maximums per venue pair. For the full breakeven math — how a 0.3% round trip erases a week of funding — read the execution costs guide, and start with the funding arbitrage guide if the strategy is new to you.

The spread as a trade

Costs are only half of the story. Because no mechanism forces two venues to quote the same price, the gap between them drifts and snaps back. Entering both legs when the spread sits near its wide percentile and exiting as it narrows earns the change in the spread — delta-neutral, and independent of funding income. The best positions combine the two edges: an entry the books pay you for, funding carry while you hold, and an exit near the tight end of the range. How cross-exchange spread trading works walks through the mechanics and the failure modes.

Methodology

Spreads are recomputed on every change of the best bid or ask on either venue, using the touch prices you would cross immediately, and summarised into one-minute bars. Averages are weighted by how long each spread lasted, and highs and lows count only levels that held for at least 200 milliseconds, so a quote that flickered for a few milliseconds does not count. The public page shows a cached top-25 snapshot; the dashboard covers every pair and window from 3 hours to 30 days.