Your CFD platform says gold is 3,412. The futures contract says 3,431. Neither is wrong, neither is a feed error, and the gap between them is the single reason copying a stop price from one to the other does not work.
Two screens, one desk. The CFD platform shows gold at 3,412.40. The Tradovate chart shows the December contract at 3,431.75. The same metal, the same second, a gap of just over nineteen dollars. A trader seeing this for the first time reasonably assumes one of the feeds is broken.
Neither is. The answer to the headline question is that a CFD and a futures contract are quoting two different things: the CFD tracks something close to the spot price, while the futures contract is a price for delivery on a date in the future, and that future date has a cost attached to it. The difference between the two is called the basis. It is a real, arbitraged, well-behaved number — and it is exactly why a stop price copied from one market to the other lands somewhere you did not intend.
INFO
Quick answer. A futures price embeds the cost of holding the underlying until expiry — financing, storage, and any income forgone — so it differs from spot by an amount called the basis. The basis shrinks towards zero as expiry approaches and resets when the contract rolls. Copy a stop by distance from entry, never by absolute price, whenever a trade crosses between CFD and futures.
For a commodity, the logic is a warehouse. If you want gold in December and gold is available today, you have two routes: buy it now and hold it, or agree a price now for December. Those routes have to cost roughly the same or somebody arbitrages the difference.
Buying now and holding costs you the money you tied up — the financing rate — plus storage and insurance. So the December price should be roughly the spot price plus those carrying costs. That is the basis.
Two features of that formula explain most of what you will observe.
It varies by market. Equity index futures subtract expected dividends, which is why an index future can trade below spot when the dividend stream over the contract's life outweighs the financing. Gold, which pays nothing and costs something to store, usually trades above. Both are normal.
It is not a prediction. This is the most persistent misreading. The December gold contract being nineteen dollars above spot is not the market forecasting a nineteen-dollar rally. It is the cost of not paying for the metal until December. A futures curve is a cost structure, not a forecast.
If the basis were constant, you could copy stops with a fixed offset and be done. It is not constant, and it moves for three reasons.
Time to expiry. The carrying cost shrinks as the contract approaches delivery, so the basis converges towards zero. On the last day, the futures price and the spot price are effectively the same. A nineteen-dollar gap eight weeks out may be six dollars a fortnight out.
Interest rates. The financing component is a rate. When rate expectations move, the basis moves with them, and it does so on the days when everything else is already moving.
The roll. This is the discontinuity that matters most to anyone automating. When the front month changes, the quoted price jumps — not because anything traded, but because you are now looking at a different contract with a different time to expiry. A continuous futures chart hides this with an adjustment; a live account does not.
WARNING
A hard-coded price offset between a CFD and a futures contract works until the roll and then silently stops working. If any part of your setup contains a number you calculated by subtracting two screens once, put a date on it.
Here is the failure in its simplest illustrative form. A Provider on a CFD account takes gold long at 3,412 with a stop at 3,396 — sixteen dollars of risk. The Follower is a futures account where the contract trades at 3,431.
Copy the stop by price, and the instruction is: place a stop at 3,396 on a market trading at 3,431. That is thirty-five dollars away instead of sixteen. The Follower is carrying more than twice the intended risk, on an account whose sizing was computed for sixteen.
Run the same trade short and the arithmetic inverts into something worse. Provider short at 3,412, stop at 3,428 — sixteen dollars again. On the futures side at 3,431, a stop at 3,428 is below the current price. On a short, that is a stop the market has already passed, and depending on the venue it is either rejected or triggered immediately.
The right-hand column is the whole lesson. What is portable between two markets that quote the same underlying differently is the distance from the entry, not the price itself.
The design rule follows directly. When a trade crosses between price bases, translate the relationship, not the number.
There is a second, simpler arrangement, and it is our default where the copy crosses CFD and futures: the stop and target stay with the Provider, and the Follower's copy follows the Provider's close. The Provider holds the risk logic in the market where the levels were chosen; when it exits, the copy exits. Nothing has to be translated, because nothing is duplicated.
That default trades one risk for another, and you should know which. It removes the mistranslated-stop problem entirely. It introduces a dependency: if the Provider is unreachable, nothing is watching the Follower's level. A protective stop on the Follower, placed by distance and set wider than the Provider's so it does not fire first in normal conditions, is the standard answer — a backstop rather than the primary exit.
Neither, and the question dissolves once you see what each contract is.
The futures price is the price for delivery on a date, set on a regulated exchange, with a public order book and volume anyone can inspect. The CFD price is a broker's quote on something close to spot, and the broker manages the difference through its own financing charges.
Practically:
Overnight cost shows up differently. CFD traders pay or receive a daily swap or financing charge. Futures traders pay nothing nightly; the cost is already inside the price and reappears at each roll. Same economics, different accounting, and they are not equivalent at the same nominal size.
Transparency differs. Exchange-traded volume and depth are visible facts. A CFD's liquidity is its broker's arrangement.
Access differs. A gold CFD can be traded at 0.01 lots. The smallest listed gold future is a micro at ten ounces. Small accounts sometimes genuinely cannot express a trade in futures at the risk they intend, which is a real constraint rather than a preference.
None of that makes one instrument better. It makes them different instruments that happen to track the same thing, which is the entire reason this article exists.
Because a futures contract prices delivery on a future date and carries the cost of getting there — financing, storage, minus any income like dividends. That difference is the basis. A CFD quotes something close to spot with the financing charged to you separately each night. Same underlying, two different things being priced, and both quotes are correct.
The gap between the futures price and the spot price of the same underlying. It reflects carrying cost, it shrinks towards zero as the contract approaches expiry, and it resets when the front month rolls. A positive basis on gold is not a bullish forecast; it is the cost of deferring payment.
Yes, provided the stop and target are handled by distance rather than by absolute price, and the size is computed on the futures side from its own contract value. Our default across that boundary is simpler still: the Provider keeps the stop and target and the futures copy follows the Provider's close, with an optional protective stop on the Follower as a backstop.
Almost always because it was copied as a price between two markets with different price bases. On a long, a stop copied by price sits further away than intended; on a short, it can sit on the wrong side of the market entirely and be rejected or filled at once. The fix is to copy the distance from the fill, not the level.
It affects how the cost of holding appears, not whether you pay it. Hold a CFD overnight and you see a financing line each day. Hold futures and you see nothing nightly, but the price you paid already contained the carry and you meet it again at each roll. Comparing the two on headline spread alone will mislead you.
They suit different constraints rather than different skills. Futures offer exchange transparency, published volume and no nightly financing line, with a minimum size of one contract. CFDs offer very fine sizing and simple access, with a nightly financing charge and a broker-set quote. Account size and the granularity your risk model needs usually decide it before preference does.
If you are actively running a book across both instruments, the sizing, leverage and overnight-cost comparison in /blog/cfd-account-mastery is the practical companion to this piece. And when the trade arrives from a signal channel rather than from another account of yours, the contract-mapping and whole-number-sizing problems are covered in /blog/copy-telegram-signals-to-futures.
