
This is the “pro bread-and-butter” setup: when funding goes deeply negative, the market shows a strong skew toward shorts — shorts pay longs at each funding settlement interval.

This is a beginner-friendly classic: the market starts adding leverage (Open Interest is rising), while derivatives are not trading at a discount to the underlying (the Premium Index is not negative). In this regime, the odds of continuation are typically higher because the derivatives market doesn’t look “broken” or suppressed.