The 3 Month Futures Annualized Rolling Basis measures the annualized yield (percent return) that can be had by buying a spot asset and simultaneously selling a futures contract on that asset that expires in 3 months. Due to various supply, demand, and liquidity factors, crypto futures contracts will often trade at a price above that of the spot price. When this happens, market participants can do what is referred to commonly as a ‘basis trade’, allowing them to profit the difference in price between spot and a futures contract without taking on any directional exposure.

This is the Point-in-Time (PiT) variant of Futures Annualized Rolling Basis (3M). PiT metrics are strictly append-only and their history is immutable. The historic data does not necessarily reflect the best current knowledge, but the information at the time when a data point was first computed. PiT metrics are ideal candidates for applications in model backtesting and related quantitative purposes. Read our article on PiT metrics for more information.