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Best Swap Rates Forex Brokers in 2024

When you are looking for the best forex brokers for long term trading, best swap rates are more important than low spreads.

Well, spreads are always important and you can take them into account while choosing a broker suitable for long-term trading but you should consider swap rates first.

You want a broker with high positive swaps and low negative ones or a forex broker that the sum of its positive and negative swap rates is to the benefit of you the most.

In this post, we are going to talk about swap and its types and become familiar with the forex brokers that have the best and more favorable swap rates.

What Is Swap?

Swap is the interest paid at the time of rollover. When you hold a position overnight in a Margin FX Contract or CFD, they will be rolled to the next Business Day, which may result in you paying a Swap Charge or earning a Swap Benefit.

If you pay, it’s a negative swap and when you earn, it’s called a positive swap.

As you can see, you don’t pay or earn swap if you are a day trader or more specifically if you don’t hold to your position for the next day.

That’s why it’s just important if you are a long-term trader, not a scalper or day trader.

The reason that you earn or pay swap is that every central bank around the world has an interest rate so when you buy or sell a currency pair in a way that you hold it for more than one day, your trade or exchange is exposed to this interest rate.

For example, the Federal Reserve sets an interest rate of 1.70% for USD and the bank of Japan has an interest rate of 0.1%.

If I buy USDJPY, since the interest rate of USD is higher than JPY, I get a positive swap. In other words, I earn a profit because technically I sell a currency with a lower interest rate and buy the one with a higher rate and hold to it until the next day so I receive an interest rate for one day.

On the other hand, if I sell USDJPY, I have to pay swap or I receive a negative swap rate.

Every day that you hold your position, you receive positive or negative swap, regarding the currency pair or any other instruments you trade.

What Is Rollover and When Does it Happen?

Rollover is when the market is closed for a few minutes each day so that swap can be charged or paid to positions held at rollover.

Rollover is from 23:55 – 00:10 MT4 Server time or 5 PM EST to 5:15 PM EST every day from Monday – Friday.

This is basically the time that you see a new daily candle starts in your platform in a standard version.

The swap on Wednesdays is tripled for forex pairs because it’s the swap of three days which includes weekends and Wednesdays.

It can be an important factor if your long-term trades last for a few days. Basically, it means you are a swing trader rather than position trader.

Both swing trading and position trading are considered long-term trading but in swing trading, you hold your trades for a shorter period of time but it still lasts for a few days.

Anyway, if you are a swing trader, as far as your TPs and SLs are probably smaller than position traders, you may want to avoid larger negative swaps.

It’s worth noting that since trading on Wednesdays brings you triple swaps so you’d better avoid negative ones on Wednesdays and you can take advantage of positive swaps.

Why Is Swap Important for Long-term Trading?

Generally, when it comes to the cost of trades, the first thing that people look into is spread. Traders want to pay as fewer pips as possible especially if they are scalpers or even day traders.

However, when we are talking about the best forex brokers for long-term trading, swap is more important than spread.

Why?

Let’s see.

Imagine you are a position trader and your average trades last 10 days. The average spread for EURUSD in your broker is 0.2 pips and the commission is $7 roundturn which becomes 0.7 pips for eurusd and 0.9 pips in total (spread + commission).

Your broker has a negative swap of 0.6 pips on eurusd (-0.6 pips) as well which means for each day that you keep your trade; you have to pay 0.6 pips as swap.

Let’s say that you open one standard lot EURUSD so you have to pay $9 as spread. Your trade lasts for 10 days which means you have to pay a 10-day swap.

Since the swap for each day is 0.6 pips and your lot size is 1 standard lot ($10) and you also hold the trade for 10 days, you have to pay $60 for swap.

As you can see, although the swap is less than spread + commission at first, the main part in your cost of trade is the swap because you pay for spread and commission only once but you have to pay for the swap every day you keep the trade.

In conclusion, spread and commission are important and crucial factors in scalping or day trading but for long-term trades, swap plays a major part and can change your profit margin.

How Can I Avoid Swap?

The only way that you can avoid swap is by keeping your trades open within a day however there are some ways that you can either decrease the swap cost or even benefit from that.

If you want to lessen the amount of money you have to pay as swap, you should find and choose the forex brokers suitable for long-term trading. In other words, the ones that give you more favorable swap.

There are two ways that you can do that. Either you can go through all the brokers’ websites and find the swaps they have or alternatively choose from the list of brokers that you can see here.

I’ve dug into more than 100 brokers to find the best conditions for long-term trading, particularly the most favorable swap rates.

Another approach is to benefit from swap. It means choosing the trades with positive swap rates.

It may seem not a good idea to always do that because it probably puts a dent in your trading opportunities and you might have to lose some trades because of negative swap rates, however, you can consider that if you see a pair with a larger positive swap rate or avoid when you see a pair with a considerably big negative swap rate.

How to Select Brokers with Best Sawp for Long Term Trading?

There are a lot of forex brokers out there but how you can figure out which brokers are the best ones for long-term trading or have the best swap rates?

 You need to go through the websites of hundreds of brokers and check their swap rates out

Although it’s possible to do so it takes too much and is really time-consuming. First, you have to find forex brokers, some you already know and some you have to discover.

Then you have to find the swap sections and enter their swap rates into excel so that you can compare brokers’ swap rates later.

However, You don’t need to do that because I’ve done that process and you only need to read this article and find them from here.

How to Find Brokers with the best Swap Rates?

There are two ways that you can find the swap rates of forex brokers. You should either find the swap rates on brokers’ websites or from their trading platforms.

Most of the websites have a section that shows the swap rates but some of them don’t.

If you can’t find the swap rates on the brokers’ websites, you can find them through the platform of the brokers.

For example, in the market watch of MT4, you can right-click on the pair you want its swap rate and then select specification. You can see the swap rate on the contract specification window.

You can also do the same for other platforms like the proprietary trading platforms of brokers.

Some forex brokers have also a calculator that calculates the swap rates of that broker so you can check rates from there.

What Types of Swap Rates Do Forex Brokers Have?

After finding the correct swap rates, I changed the rates of some brokers because they are not all based on the same metrics.

Some brokers show their swap rates based on pips. Others are based on base currency, margin currency, or interest rate percentage.

Because I wanted to compare the brokers to find the best swap and consequently best brokers for long-term trading, I unified them based on pip.

For example, a swap rate of a currency pair such as USDJPY is based on base currency; which is USD for USDJPY, and it is $3.2 so we turn it into pip so it becomes 0.32 pips.

For those swap rates that are based on percentage, you need to use the following formula in order to turn them into dollar and then into pip:

Swap rate= Interest rate (%) x Contract value / 360

Where

Contract value is equal to daily close price multiplied by contract size

Contract size for forex pairs is:

  • 1 lot= 100000
  • 0.1= 10000
  • 0.01= 1000

For example, a broker shows the swap rate of EURUSD for short (sell) positions as 1.2%.

The daily close price, let’s say on Monday, is 1.1104. For finding the swap rate for EURUSD we need to put this information in the above formula.

Swap rate= 1.2% *(100000*1.1104)/360≈ 3.7

And if we want it as pip, it becomes 0.37 pips approximately.

After finding the correct swap rates and integrating them into Pip, I sorted them out and selected the forex brokers with the best and most favorable swap rates for trading long-term.

I also checked their regulations and eliminated the ones that are not regulated.

Although there are some unregulated brokers that seem reliable and have shown good performance choosing from regulated brokers is safer in my opinion.

One more thing!

Swap rates change every day so you may see different rates than you see in the table here, however, this difference is not pivotal in a way that changes the rank of the brokers and turns a broker with good positive or negative swap into a bad one.

Forex Brokers with the Best Swap for Long-term Trading

Here’s a list of top 10 Forex brokers with the best swap rates for long-term trading:

Note: All the brokers in the table below are the best forex brokers for long-term trading and the above brokers are listed based on the best swap for EURUSD. For more information, read the following lines and find the broker that best suits your needs.

In our table, we put three types of swap: long, short, and average.

Since we want the best forex brokers for long-term trading, we need the best swap both negative and positive, however, some brokers have a favorable positive swap but the negative swap is not good and vice versa.

For example, a broker may have a 3-pip positive long swap for eurusd which is absolutely high but it has an 8-pip negative short swap as well so the swap rate is not in your favor in general.

For finding out the total swap rates that you receive, I put the average of swap rates (long and short) in the table so you can sort the table based on that to see the brokers with the best swap rates in total.

There’s only a selection of currency pairs here which includes 4 pairs: EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDCAD, and GBPJPY. If you trade specific selections of pairs that are not included here, you can find their swap rates on the website of the following brokers.

Swap rates change every day and the following rates are just a sample that shows the brokers with the best swap rates. In other words, the swap rates change but the rankings of the forex brokers stay intact to a great extent.

Click on average swap headers to sort the brokers based on the most favorable swap rates according to the mentioned currency pairs.

Brokereurusd long swapeurusd short swapeurusd average swapgbpusd long swapgbpusd short swapgbpusd average swapgbpjpy long swapgbpjpy short swapgbpjpy average swapusdcad long swapusdcad short swapusdcad average swap
FXChoice-0.280.110.085-0.050.01-0.020.02-0.08-0.03-0.04-0.06-0.05
Leoprime-0.08-0.12-0.10.01-0.65-0.32-0.53-0.15-0.34-0.55-0.1-0.325
AxiTrader-0.430.15-0.14-0.220.01-0.115-0.14-0.13-0.135-0.1-0.18-0.14
Swissquote Bank0.44-0.75-0.1550.096-0.41-0.157-0.680.12-0.28-0.15-0.17-0.16
FBS-0.380.06-0.16-0.21-0.09-0.15-0.11-0.2-0.15-0.15-0.19-0.17
IG Markets0.5-0.83-0.1650.13-0.54-0.205000-0.89-1.19-1.04
EXNESS0.5-0.87-0.1850.13-0.7-0.285-0.890.02-0.435-0.21-0.11-0.16
Just2Trade 0.590-0.295-0.29-0.26-0.27-0.34-0.53-0.27-0.17-0.14-0.155
OctaFX -0.19-0.21-0.2-0.48-0.28-0.38-0.43-0.01-0.22-0.01-0.42-0.215
IC Markets0.49-0.9-0.2050.09-0.71-0.31-0.620.07-0.275-0.34-0.25-0.295
FXCM0.42-0.89-0.2350.2-0.46-0.130000.004-0.073-0.034
Forex.com   0.38-0.91-0.2650.04-0.61-0.285000-0.22-0.28-0.25
Global Prime0.39-0.95-0.280.23-0.47-0.12-0.460.22-0.12-0.13-0.07-0.1
PFD0.38-0.94-0.280.16-0.49-0.165-0.8-0.05-0.425-0.49-0.21-0.35
Hotforex0.01-1.15-0.570.1-0.85-0.375-0.750.01-0.37-0.45-0.15-0.3
FP Markets0.5-0.87-0.1850.12-0.53-0.205-0.780.07-0.335-0.26-0.24-0.25

David

I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is David and I've been in Forex Market since 2006. I created this site to convey my experience and try to help forex traders to make better decisions. Share this post if you liked it and let me know what you think about it in the comment section.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    Hi. If a – is before the number, does it mean you pay swap or earn swap?

  2. Peter Williams

    All very interesting and thank you for the explanation.

    You state 1.2% *(100000*1.1104)/360≈ 1.33 —— I used this equation and got 3.70.
    The result doesn’t really matter if the mathematics for the equation are correct

    1. david

      Sorry, you’re right. I corrected that. Sometimes I change some numbers in an equation but forget to change others. I probably changed the price for some reason but then forgot to calculate the outcome.

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