What does it cost to hold a stock perp? A year of funding rates on Tesla, Nvidia, Apple and other on-chain stocks

Why funding matters

When you buy a share, you pay once and can hold it forever at no extra cost. A perpetual future works differently. Because it never expires, the exchange needs another way to keep its price close to the real asset. That mechanism is the funding rate: a payment between the two sides of the market, settled every hour on Hyperliquid. When the perp trades above its reference price – usually because more traders want to be long – longs pay shorts. When it trades below, shorts pay longs.

For a quick trade, funding hardly matters. For anyone holding a stock perp for weeks or months as a substitute for owning the stock, it is the main ongoing cost, and it is rarely shown clearly. We collected every hourly funding payment for Hyperliquid's trade.xyz markets since December 2025 – eight large US stocks, the Nasdaq-100, gold, silver, WTI oil, the euro and the yen – plus Bitcoin and Ether for comparison.

All figures below are annualised: an average hourly rate multiplied by the 8,760 hours in a year, so they can be compared with interest rates.

The cost of holding a long stock perp

From December 2025 to November 2026, longs paid on average:

• Alphabet 9.6%, Nvidia 8.8% and Amazon 8.7% a year – the most expensive.
• Meta 7.2%, Microsoft 6.9%, Tesla 6.0% and Coinbase 5.1%.
• Apple 1.8% – by far the cheapest.

The average across the eight stocks was 6.8% a year. In other words, holding $10,000 of exposure through a long stock perp cost roughly $680 over the year in funding, before trading fees. A perp holder also receives no dividends; on the other hand, no capital is tied up beyond the margin.

The Nasdaq-100 perp (XYZ100) was cheaper than most single stocks at 2.7% a year, and gold and silver cost 8.4% and 10.0%.

The base rate does most of the work

The table shows that in roughly half of all hours, funding on the trade.xyz markets was exactly 0.000625% per hour – about 5.5% a year. This is the base rate built into the funding formula, which applies whenever the perp is trading close to its reference price. It works much like an interest charge for borrowing the exposure. Hyperliquid's main crypto perps such as Bitcoin and Ether use a base rate twice as high (about 11% a year).

So most of the cost of a stock perp is not caused by crowded positioning – it is the default rate. The extra on top, or the discount below it, comes from the hours when the perp trades at a premium or a discount. Longs paid funding in 74% (Apple) to 91% (Alphabet, Amazon) of all hours.

Weekdays vs weekends

Funding is heavily concentrated on weekdays, when the US market is open and traders are most active. Across the eight stocks, longs paid an average of 8.8% a year (annualised) on weekdays but only 1.7% on weekends. On Coinbase, weekend funding was even slightly negative (−2.5%) – shorts paid longs. This matches what we found in our tracking study: weekends are quiet, and the perps rarely trade at a premium then.

When longs get paid: oil and the yen

Funding is not always a cost for longs. On the WTI oil perp, shorts paid longs an average of 16% a year (24% in the last 90 days), even though longs paid in 60% of hours – the hours when shorts paid were much larger. On the yen market, funding was negative in most hours, averaging −5.6% a year. In these markets more traders wanted to be short than long, and the funding mechanism paid the longs for taking the other side. The euro market charged a modest 3.0%.

Compared with Bitcoin and Ether

Over the full period, holding a long Bitcoin perp cost 5.5% a year and an Ether perp 6.2% – slightly less than the stock average. The comparison changed during the year. In February to April 2026, when crypto markets were weak, BTC and ETH funding fell to near zero or below, and it stayed under stock-perp funding through June, while stock perps kept charging 3–10%. From July, as crypto funding rose back to 8–11% a year, the average stock perp became the cheaper of the two.

Individual months can be expensive. Nvidia's funding averaged 21.6% (annualised) in February 2026 and Microsoft's 17.2% in June 2026, and the most extreme single hours reached about 0.08% for Coinbase and 0.16% for silver.

OKX for comparison

OKX's USDT-margined stock swaps settle funding every eight hours. Over August to November 2026 their annualised averages were lower – between about 0.5% (Microsoft) and 8.2% (Alphabet), mostly 3–4% – with many funding periods at exactly zero. Different venues use different formulas, so the cost of the same exposure can differ by several percentage points a year.

What this means

1. Holding a long stock perp has cost around 2–10% a year in funding, 6.8% on average for eight large US stocks.
2. Most of that is the built-in base rate (about 5.5% a year on trade.xyz markets); premiums add to it on busy weekdays.
3. Weekends are cheap, and some markets – such as oil and the yen – have paid longs.
4. Funding varies by venue and by month, so it is worth checking before holding a position for a long time.

For live levels and volatility ranges on these markets, see our Tesla, Nvidia, gold and oil pages.