A stock contract against the stock itself
Crypto venues now list contracts on stocks: a bet on the price of Tesla or Samsung, inside a crypto exchange. The stock keeps its own exchange's hours. The contract trades all day and all night, weekends included.
- Perp
- A contract that bets on a price rather than owning it. You hold no coin, only the bet — and the bet can be placed on a fall.
- Index price
- An outside reference, usually an average across several venues. A venue without one can let its price drift on its own.
- Mark price
- The price the exchange uses to compute your profit and to decide whether to liquidate you. It can differ from what the book shows.
- Leverage and liquidation
- Leverage is trading a size larger than your own money. If the price moves against you far enough, the exchange closes the position for you — that is liquidation.
- Instruments polled
- 670+
- Open gaps
- 0 — market closed
- Until the open
- 14h 20m
Why it happens
This is a perp — not owning the share but a contract on its price. No share, no dividend, and in exchange you can trade whenever you like. That is the whole plot: the real exchange is open about a third of the day, and the contract runs through all of it.
News lands on a Saturday: the contract moves, the stock does not, because there is no trading in it. The difference piles up until the open. That is not a glitch and not anybody's mistake, it is how the thing is built: at the weekend the real price does not exist.
There is a second case that looks identical and works differently. A venue can compute its own price, and then the "lag" is its own number rather than a delay. Telling the two apart is half the job. The index price helps: a venue with an outside reference will return to it, and a venue without one drifts and returns to nothing.
And the third thing to understand up front: a gap is closed from both ends. The contract can travel to the stock, or the stock to the contract. Which one moved flips the outcome to its opposite.
One more subtlety is the mark price: the exchange may compute your profit, and decide on your liquidation, from something other than the book. With the real market closed that reference goes soft, and on large leverage that is dangerous.
How people use it
- Separate "the feed is lagging" from "the venue prices it itself" — nothing else matters until you have.
- The moment that counts is the real market opening, not the overnight drift by itself.
- A gap that closed is not the same as money made: which side travelled is the whole question.
- Check what price the venue liquidates from before you take leverage.
Where it breaks
While the market is closed there is nothing to check either side against — the real price does not exist during those hours. So a good share of overnight gaps stay unverifiable: it looks like it converged, but you cannot say what converged to what.
What we track here
- Compares every stock contract against the real share price and against the median of the other venues, all day.
- Sorts each gap into three cases: the feed is behind, the venue prices it itself, or the market was shut while news happened.
- Runs the reverse detector too — the venue's quote frozen while the real price walked away.
- Follows each episode through to the market open, because that is what resolves it, not the numbers happening to meet overnight.
- You can tell a lag you could trade from a venue's invented price, which never converges.
- You know when a gap is being measured against nothing because the real market is closed.
- If you take these with leverage, you see which price your liquidation is computed from.