Pepperstone opens 24/7 markets — what a perpetual CFD really costs

Pepperstone announced on 15 July that its perpetual CFDs — until now a single contract tracking SpaceX — expand to gold, silver, the Nasdaq, the S&P 500, WTI and Brent crude, all tradable 24/7. The product page's pipeline goes further: single stocks like Tesla and AMD, bitcoin and ether, and pre-IPO perpetuals on Anthropic and OpenAI. CEO Tamas Szabo's framing, from the release: "The concept of markets opening and closing at fixed hours is becoming increasingly outdated."

What a perpetual CFD actually is

A classic CFD mirrors the underlying market during its normal hours — when the exchange closes, your position simply sits there, and no weekend financing exists because there is nothing to finance against. A perpetual CFD instead tracks a perpetual futures market, the crypto-native contract type that never expires and never closes. Pepperstone's version keeps two familiar CFD guardrails: you own nothing underlying, and positions close through standard margin-call and stop-out rules rather than the auto-deleveraging used on crypto venues.

That mechanic is also what makes a SpaceX perpetual possible at all: SpaceX has no listed shares, so the contract tracks a synthetic price for a private company — a market that exists only in derivative form. The planned Anthropic and OpenAI contracts would work the same way.

The funding rate — a cost that never sleeps

Perpetual contracts stay glued to their underlying through funding payments between traders. Pepperstone's guide describes its version precisely: a "single weekly swap rate, set in advance", posted as daily entries and "recalibrated each week" to keep the contract aligned — longs pay shorts or vice versa, with no broker markup on the rate.

That daily entry accrues every day, Saturdays and Sundays included. The classic CFDs most readers know from a broker like XTB charge overnight swaps only on trading days — a weekend position parks for free because the market is shut. The actual per-instrument rates live inside the platform, not on the public pages — so before holding a perp over a weekend, open the contract's funding screen and do the two-minute math for your position size.

Who can actually trade it

The release says the contracts run "across eligible Pepperstone entities, subject to local regulatory requirements" — and the EU guide spells out what that means in practice: availability depends on your jurisdiction, client classification and an appropriateness assessment. Finance Magnates' independent report adds the regulatory frame: EU authorities treat perpetual futures as CFDs, so ESMA's retail leverage caps apply to these contracts like any other CFD. Pepperstone's own honesty notes are worth quoting too: 24/7 "should not be understood as guaranteed uninterrupted trading", and the EU pages carry a 72.9% retail loss disclaimer (the global page says 79.6%).

My read: the release is dated 15 July, but Finance Magnates found these contracts already trading for clients of eligible entities on 13 July — Pepperstone announced a product it had already switched on. Whether a weekend funding meter suits how you trade is your call, not ours.

CFDs are complex, leveraged instruments and a large majority of retail accounts lose money trading them — Pepperstone's own pages put it at 72.9–79.6% depending on entity. This article describes the product as published; it is not investment advice, and perpetual contracts' weekend funding makes them materially different from the CFDs you may know.