Forex Trading Conditions

For FX Spot and FX Forwards the trade tiles in Saxo Bank’s trading platform are colour-coded Red (to sell) and Blue (to buy) for all instruments where:

• Prices are realtime
• Market is open

Instruments are colour-coded Grey where prices are not realtime, or the market is not open. Non-tradable instruments will have flat non-clickable tiles.

For FX Options the trade tiles are colour-coded accordingly, to indicate the availability of the price quoted to you:

Green - live streaming prices are available for auto execution

Yellow - prices are available on an RFQ (request for quote) basis. A dealer will manually quote the client, which makes the prices green and therefore tradable

Purple - the market is closed (trading and RFQ not available)

Saxo Bank executes client trade requests on an Order Driven basis. This applies to all of Saxo Bank's extensive range of instruments, except for FX Options which trade on a Quote Driven Model (green pricing).

An Order Driven Model provides an executable price that is based on Saxo’s own liquidity, in addition to liquidity available on a DMA basis in the broader market. Clients are provided with greater control over the way that their order is traded through user defined Price Tolerance, with the potential for benefiting from price improvement. An Order Driven Model may result in partial fills in the event that there is not enough liquidity available at the price and/or at the size requested. 

Price Tolerance defines the minimum price (when selling) or the maximum price (when buying) that the client is comfortable accepting. Tolerance can be specified either as a fixed price increment or as a percentage of the current market price. The default is set to 0.01% of the current market price for all currency pairs, but is configurable on an individual currency pair level.

Various order types can be can be used to enter or exit a position. See Order Execution.

All open FX positions held overnight are subject to a debit or credit interest rate revaluation to reflect the position being rolled over to a new Value Date. The operation known as the Tom/Next Rollover is applied to spot positions held at 17:00 Eastern Standard Time (New York time) on any given trading day.

The ‘rollover’ is made up of two components, namely the tom/next swap points and financing of unrealised profits or losses. The accumulated combined rollover credit or debit is added/deducted from the previous opening price of the position. Read more about Tom/Next Rollover.

Below the threshold amount a minimum ticket fee of $10 is charged on the trade to cover administration costs. For most currency pairs the threshold amount is 5,000 units of the base currency, however variations occur. Precious metals can be traded as low as 1 ounce. 

Trades cannot be executed below the Minimum Trade Sizes (except for closing an open position below the minimum trade size).

Saxo Bank is open for Forex Trading from Monday morning 5:00 local Sydney time to Friday afternoon 17:00 Eastern Standard Time (New York time). Some currency crosses, however, have special trading hours as seen in the table below.

* In instances where no liquidity can be sourced in the market, these trading hours may be further reduced on a day-to-day basis
** Special dates and times for FX Metals apply on U.S. national holidays to reflect the trading hours of the underlying futures market

Please note Saxo FX Metals Trading hours follow the CME Group holiday calendar which is available on the CME Group public website.

Most FX spot positions have a value date of T+2. This means they settle two business days after the day of execution. There are some exceptions to this; USDTRY, USDRUB and USDCAD, which all have a value date of T+1. At Saxo Bank, FX spot positions do not settle. Instead, open positions held at the end of a trading day are rolled over to the new spot value date as described under 'Tom/Next rollover'.

When netting open FX positions, Saxo Bank uses FIFO rules, which means the first position you open is the first position to be closed.

Example: You are trading EURUSD opening the following positions:

The first long position 1) will net out with the first short position 3), the second long position 2) will net out with half of the second short position 4), leaving only one short position of 1M EURUSD at the end of the day.

The FX NOP Value (Net Open Position Value) is the sum of all the short individual exposures for all currencies converted into the base currency of the account.

If your FX NOP value exceeds the FX NOP limit, you will only be able to place FX trades that close positions or reduce the FX NOP value. If you are in a breached status and attempt to trade over that limit an error message will inform you that the NOP limit has been breached.

The breakdown in single currency exposures used to calculate the FX NOP value, can be found under "Account"- "Account Exposure" in SaxoTrader.

Updated 15th November, 2016

---

FX Forward Outrights Trading Conditions

With over 123 FX Forwards outrights traded at Saxo Bank, you benefit from liquidity available on all major currency pairs.

FX Forward Outrights are traded with a predefined future value date. You can select any value date (odd-date), not just standard tenors.

Closed Forward Outright position are netted out when the value date of the position equals the current spot value date i.e. the position is changing from a forward to a spot.

When the value date on an open Forward Outright position equals the current spot value date, it will be subject to tom/next rollovers and will be treated as a normal spot position from that point onwards.

Updated 15th November, 2016