A perpetual contract is a futures contract with the expiry taken out. You hold it as long as you like, and a payment called funding passes between longs and shorts to keep its price near the thing it tracks. Crypto has run on these for years. The newer development is the same contract written on stocks, indexes, metals and currencies.
What you are actually trading
A stock perp does not hold shares. It tracks a reference price, called the oracle, and settles in a stablecoin. Buy the NVDA perp and you have exposure to NVDA’s price moves with no claim on the company, no dividend and no vote. That makes it closer to a contract for difference than to an option or a share.
Two prices matter. The oracle is the reference the contract is meant to follow. The mark is what the perp itself is trading at. The gap between them is the premium, and it is the cleanest read on which side is leaning harder. The mechanics are the same ones described in how a perpetual price is formed and the index price behind a perpetual.
It does not close
This is the property that changes things for an equity trader. The stock market shuts on Friday afternoon and reopens on Monday. A stock perp keeps trading through all of it. For those hours the perp is the only live price on that name, which makes it a running estimate of where the stock opens.
It is an estimate priced by whoever is trading it, in whatever depth exists at that hour. Treat it as a market price on a different venue. It tells you where traders have the stock right now, and the open can still land somewhere else.
Funding replaces the clock
With no expiry to pull the contract back to the underlying, funding does that job. When the perp trades above its reference, longs pay shorts, which makes holding a long cost something and invites sellers. When it trades below, shorts pay. The rate is small per hour and adds up over a year, which is why it is usually quoted annualised. Funding on a stock perp takes that apart.
Where they trade
The largest set lives on Hyperliquid, where outside teams can list their own markets on separate books. One ticker can appear on more than one of those books, each with its own price and its own open interest. They are separate markets and should never be added together, which is the same rule the crypto map applies to funding per venue.
On 4 October 2026 the S&P 500 perp alone carried about $349 million of open interest, on a Sunday, with the stock market shut. That is the scale that makes it worth reading.
What to read on one
Four numbers carry most of it: the move since the last cash close, funding, open interest, and the premium to the oracle. The NoVo Crypto Market Map lists every stock and index perp with all four on its Stocks On-Chain tab, and the Trader dashboard shows the index perps and the largest names beside the dealer map.