Q. How do you work out CFD Interest Swaps with an example?Q. How do you work out CFD Interest Swaps with an example?
Answer: CFDs is an instrument where you pay a small amount of money to be exposed to the full value of the share.
With CFDs, there are daily charges when you buy and daily income interest that you receive when you sell (go short).
The charge is known as a ‘daily swap’ or ‘daily interest charge’.
You can ask your broker what the annual interest swap rate is or you’ll most likely be able to find it on your platform…
With my broker for example, the long swap (for when you buy) is -9.47% per year.
And the short swap (for when you sell) is 2.71%.
With your Shoprite trade, because you’re buying CFDs (which is a geared instrument), you’re essentially borrowing the money from the bank.
This means, you have to pay interest on the borrowed funds (in order to be exposed to the full value).
Those are the ‘swaps’ we’re talking about.
Let’s say the Shoprite share is trading at R223.19 and the margin (initial deposit) to buy 1 CFD is 9.7% (R21.70).
This means, when you buy 1 CFD for R21.70, you’ll be exposed to the full R223.19 worth of the share.
If you buy 100 CFDs and pay R2,170 (100 CFDs X R21.70) you’ll be exposed to the full R22,319 worth of shares (100 shares X 223.19).
And if you sold the 100 CFDs at R236.00, you would have been exposed to R23,600.
On that R22,319 exposure, you’ll pay 9.47% (R2,113.60) interest (swap) per year.
But luckily as traders, you don’t need to worry about paying the full amount, as we like to hold only for a short period of time.
This means, each day you hold the CFD with exposure of R22,319 – you’ll only pay R5.49.
(Exposure of your trade X 9.47%) ÷ 365 days.
If the exposure never changed and you held onto your trade at the same share price you would pay R54.90 (after 10 days).
However, we know that share prices move up and down each day.
The higher the market goes up, the higher your exposure where you’ll pay slightly more.
If the market price drops, you will pay slightly less.
However, as traders we don’t tend to hold for more than a couple of days or weeks to curb the daily interest charges.
If you have any other questions please ask in the comments :)
Trade well, live free.
Timon
MATI Trader
Interestrate
Spitting Thoughts : the ECB Interest Rate, do we understand it?..and when I say we, I mean us retail traders without financial / economy background.
"More hawkish than expected is good for currency"
This is what stated in one of the popular website's economic calendar. How do you define more hawkish when it comes to this specific risk event? Is it just simply the headline number "ECB cut rates to 0.25%"? Is it all about the ECB's president speech afterward? What we know, the interest rate is the major mover for the respective currency in the long term. Meaning, what we understood as it would dictate the bearishness or the bullishness of the currency for the next few months or years.
If you just follow this website's basic interpretation of the risk event, that more hawkish means good for currency, and hence cutting or increasing rates unfortunately being assumed and oversimplified as binary for retail traders to latch onto. If ECB cut rates, it is "bad" for the currency (bearish) and if ECB increases rates, it is "good" for the currency (bullish). At least that is what I was taught.
You look at the chart on Nov 7th, 2013, the ECB cut-rate to 0.25% whilst the consensus (according to what was printed every website that has Economic Calendar) was 0.50%.
The general logic dictates that the Euro should be bearish. That day EURUSD was indeed having a major sell-off but look at what happened after that? EURUSD went up for the next 7 months.
A similar-ish thing happened (the surprise and the decision to cut the interest rate) on the 5th of June 2014 and the 4th September 2014 but the outcomes couldn't be any more different.
The ECB decision in June 2014, the price went up instead of down for the entirety of that trading month, albeit after EURUSD trending down for the last 4 weeks prior to the ECB rate decision. The ECB decision in September 2014, the price finally went according to the general logic that "cut rates = currency bearish", down. However, take a look at the trend at the time. EURUSD was in a bearish trend for the past 2 months prior to the ECB rate decision.
Whilst the headline numbers told us, retail traders, the same thing (surprise number, cut rates), the outcome was different. I believe in FUndamental Analysis and this post is by no means to disregard this side of the analytical spectrum but trading based on this risk event is too complex and above our "pay grade". We can see how it creates a spike? Then the least take away that I hope the readers would get from reading this is to NOT to trade EURUSD on the day of the rate decision. If you were already in a position on that day, CLOSE YOUR TRADE. "I have my stop-loss dude, I am good". Erm Wrong! Your stop loss will not be guaranteed to be filled at the price you are putting. SLIPPAGES happen. There's a signal today for EURUSD, trade it, by all means, just make sure you close it before the risk event.