We offer Islamic swap free accounts, which means you can hold positions overnight without paying any swap at all. If that suits how you trade, contact our support team and they will set one up for you.
| Hold Length | Nights Charged | Effective Days | Total Swap |
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Spot forex settles two business days after the trade. A position rolled over on Wednesday settles on Friday, and rolling that forward covers Saturday and Sunday as well. To account for those extra two days, brokers charge three nights of swap on Wednesday. Hold a trade across two Wednesdays and you pay for four extra nights.
Swap is applied at the daily rollover, which is midnight platform time, also called server time. This is not your local time, so check the clock in your platform rather than your own. Close before the rollover and no swap is charged for that day. Hold past it, even by a minute, and a full night is charged. There is no rollover on Saturday or Sunday because the market is closed.
Every currency pair involves borrowing one currency to buy another, so swap reflects the interest rate difference between the two, adjusted by your broker markup. Buy the higher yielding currency and you may receive a credit. Buy the lower yielding one and you pay.
Long and short on the same pair have different swap rates, and often opposite signs. A pair that costs you to hold long may pay you to hold short. Always take the rate for the direction you are actually trading rather than assuming it is the same both ways.
Swap is small on a single night and quietly significant over weeks. A swing trader holding for a month on a high swap pair can lose a large slice of the profit to carrying costs alone, which is why it belongs in your plan before you enter, not after.
Swap, also called the overnight financing fee or rollover, is the amount credited or debited for holding a position past the daily rollover at midnight platform time, also called server time. It comes from the interest rate difference between the two currencies in the pair, adjusted by your broker markup, so it can be a cost or a credit depending on the pair and your direction.
Because spot forex settles two business days after the trade date. A position held through the Wednesday rollover settles on Friday, and carrying it forward also covers Saturday and Sunday. Brokers therefore charge three nights of swap on Wednesday instead of one, so a position held across two Wednesdays pays for four extra nights.
Close your positions before the midnight rollover on your platform, which is why day traders pay no swap at all. You can also trade pairs where your direction earns a credit rather than a cost, or use a swap free account if your broker offers one, though those usually carry an administration fee instead.
Swap affects your account balance, so it reduces your profit and can pull you closer to a drawdown limit on a losing position held for a long time. It is easy to overlook because it appears separately from your trade result. If you are swing trading a funded account, factor it in when planning your target.
In MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, right click the symbol in Market Watch and open Specification, where the long and short swap values are listed in points. In Match Trader, open the instrument details or symbol information panel and look for the swap long and swap short values. Figures differ by broker and change over time, so take the current value from your own account rather than relying on a published average.
Multiply the swap points by the value of one point for your position. One point is the last decimal place of the price, so on a five decimal pair like EUR/USD a point is 0.00001, and across a standard lot of 100,000 units that makes one point worth one dollar. Swap of minus 5.30 points therefore costs 5.30 dollars per lot per night. On pairs not quoted in dollars the point value has to be converted at the current rate first.
A pip is the fourth decimal place on most pairs and a point is the fifth, so a point is one tenth of a pip. Brokers quote swap in points rather than pips, which is why the numbers look larger than you might expect. This calculator works in points to match what your platform shows you.
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