Futures Contract

Future contracts allow the price risk to be separated from the reliability risk by removing the former from the set of factors giving rise to opportunism. The governance structure supplied by the exchange authority effectively eliminates reliability risk from future trading. The seller of futures contracts incurs a liability not to the buyer, but to the clearing house, and likewise the buyer acquires an asset from the clearing house. The clearing house in effect guarantees all transactions. In addition, the exchange rules, especially regarding its members’ contract, severely limit their ability to behave opportunistically. Organized exchanges greatly reduce default and reliability risk from future contracts.… Read the rest

Comparison and Features of Future and Forward Markets

A Comparison Between Future and Forward Markets

As a common trend and general preference, it is most unlikely that the investors would ever involve in the forward market, it is important to understand some of the attitudes, particularly as a good deal of the literature on pricing futures contracts typically refers to those contracts interchangeably. Specially differences resulting from liquidity, credit risk, margin, taxes and commissions could cause futures and forward contracts not to be priced identically. For example, in dealing with price risk, futures contracts have several advantages of transaction in comparison to forward contracts. Sequential spot contracts, which is also known as spot contracts where the terms of the contract are re negotiated as events unfold, do not inject any certainty into the transaction.… Read the rest

Spot and Forward Foreign Exchange Rates

There are two types of foreign exchange rates, namely the spot rate and forward rates ruling in the foreign exchange market. The spot rate of exchange refers to the rate or price in terms of home currency payable for spot delivery of a specified type of foreign exchange. The forward rate of exchange refers to the price at which a transaction will be consummated at some specified time in future.

In modern times the system of forward rate of foreign exchange has assumed great importance in affecting the international capital movements and foreign exchange banks play an important role in this respect by matching the purchases and sales of forward exchange on the part of would be importers and would be exporters respectively.… Read the rest

Features of Currency Swap Market

The currency swap market is the oldest and most creative sector of the swap market. This is not distinguished in market terms between the fixed rate currency swap and the currency coupon swap. There is no distinction in market terms between these two types of currency swaps because the only difference is whether the counter currency receipt/payment is on a fixed or floating basis – in structure and result, the two types of swaps are identical and it is a matter of taste (or preference) for one or both counter-parties to choose a fixed or floating payment. When the dollar is involved on one side of a given transaction, the possibility to convert a fixed rate preference on one side to a floating rate preference on the other side through interest rate swap market makes any distinction even more irrelevant.… Read the rest

Swaps Risk and Exposure

The great bulk of swap activity of date has concentrated on currencies and interest rates, yet these do not exhaust the swap concept’s applicability. As one moves out the yield curve, the primary interest rate swap market becomes dominated by securities transactions and in particular the Eurodollar bond market. The advent of the swap market has meant that the Eurodollar bond market now never closes due to interest rate levels: issuers who would not come to market because of high interest rates now do so to the extent that a swap is available. Indeed, the Eurodollar bond market owes much of its spectacular growth to the parallel growth of its swap market.… Read the rest

Basis Rate Swaps

A fast developing area in the international swap markets is the basis rate swap. The structure of the basis rate swaps is the same as the straight interest rate swaps, with the exception that floating interest calculated on one basis is exchanged for floating interest calculated on a different basis. The forerunner of this type of swap was the US Dollar Prime Rate LIBOR swap. However, an even larger market has developed for the exchange of 1 month US Dollar LIBOR for 6 month US Dollar LIBOR and more recently US Dollar LIBOR for US Dollar commercial paper at much finer rates than those available on the foreign exchange market.… Read the rest

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