Overnight funding

Why is overnight funding charged?

When placing a CFD trade, you’re using leverage. This means you are effectively being lent the money required to open your position, outside the initial deposit you’ve paid.

Using the example of CFDs, let’s say you’re using a cash CFD. As we explain on the expiries page, this type of trade is designed primarily for short-term positions. So, if you want to keep it open overnight, you will be charged a small fee to cover the cost of the money you’ve effectively borrowed.

The charge will be triggered once you pass the daily cut-off time (typically 7am AEST, although this varies for some international and local markets). If you close your position on the same day before this time, there is no funding fee.

Note, overnight funding is only paid on cash CFDs. For future products, or those with an expiry date, you don’t pay this charge – instead, they have a wider spread.

How are the charges calculated?

Shares, indices and other markets

For the majority of markets, other than forex and spot metals, our funding fee is comprised of our admin fee plus or minus the relevant interbank rate for the currency in which your trade is made (depending on whether your position is long or short). The interbank rate is the interest rate charged between banks for short-term loans. It is a key indicator for other interest rate charges.

Let's say you have a long trade on shares. Our funding charge would be based on SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate), which is the interest rate that major banks charge to lend funds to each other. We would calculate it like this:

For a short position on the same market, the calculation would be the same except that SOFR would be deducted from our 3% admin fee.

The formula uses a 365-day divisor for UK, Singapore and South African shares and index markets and a 360-day divisor for all other markets.

Forex and spot metals

For forex and spot metals deals, we charge the tom-next rate plus a small admin fee not exceeding 0.3% (0.8% for mini contracts) per annum.

Tom-next, an industry-standard rate, is short for 'tomorrow-next day', and is the means by which forex speculators are able to keep forex positions open overnight without taking physical delivery of a currency. They manage this by swapping any overnight positions for an equivalent contract that starts the next day. The price difference between the two contracts is called the tom-next adjustment.

To give an example, let’s say you’re trading on a forex pair EURUSD for which the tom-next rate is 0.72/0.75. In this case we’d use:

• 0.72 to calculate the funding cost on a short position
• -0.75 to calculate the funding cost on a long position

And our calculation would look like this: