OANDA Asia Pacific: How much margin do I need to open a position/place a trade?

Margin requirements with OANDA vary based on the type of product you wish to buy or sell, as well as the division in which your account is contracted with. To understand how much margin you need to open a position/place a trade, you must first know what division your account is contracted with. Secondly, you need to know which financial product you wish to buy or sell.

Your margin requirement will be displayed in the order window on the OANDA platform when you enter the details of your order before placing a trade, as seen below:

In this example, the margin required on a 1,000-unit trade of EUR/USD would be $77.49 SGD.

A full list of margin rates for each division can be found on our Spreads and margin pages using the links below:

Using specific order types, such as Guaranteed Stop Loss Orders (GSLOs) may reduce the amount of margin required on your order(s).

Margin is expressed as a percentage on OANDA’s SpreadClosedThe difference between the bid and the ask of a currency price. and margin pages (see the section above for links to these pages).

In the example below, the currency pair is USD/SGD and the margin is 5.0%. Please note that margin is based on the division you contract with and is subject to change.

You can calculate your margin using the following formula: 

Margin required = (margin % / 100%) x the number of units you wish to buy or sell

Assuming you want to buy 10,000 units of USD/SGD, your formula would be as follows: 

(5% / 100%) x 10,000 units of USD/SGD = 500 USD

If your trading account currency is in Singapore dollars, you will need to bring 500 US dollars back into Singapore dollars at the midpoint rates between the current sell and buy exchange rate with the formula of (sell rate + buy rate)/2. 

500 USD x (1.41776+1.41808)/2 = 708.96 SGD

The margin required for this trade in your home account currency is 708.96 SGD.

If you were to trade 10,000 units of EUR/GBP, which has a 5.0% margin requirement, the margin required is 500 EUR. 

(5% / 100%) x 10,000 units of EUR/GBP = 500 EUR

Because the currency pair EUR/GBP does not have Singapore dollars in it, we must convert 500 EUR to SGD at the live midpoint EUR/SGD exchange rate. For this example, we can suppose the midpoint exchange rate is 1.54960. 

500 EUR x 1.54960 = 774.80 SGD

The margin required for this trade in your home account currency is 774.80 SGD.

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