OANDA Europe Limited: 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 fxTrade 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 £29.24 GBP.

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

Margin is expressed as a percentage on OANDA’s ‘Spread and margin’ pages (see the section above for links to these pages).

In the example below, the currency pair is EUR/GBP and the margin is 3.3%. 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 EUR/GBP, your formula would be as follows:

(3.3% / 100%) x 10,000 units of EUR/GBP = 330 EUR

If your trading account currency is in British pounds, you will need to bring 330 Euros back into British pounds at the midpoint rates between the current sell and buy exchange rate with the formula of (sell rate + buy rate)/2.

330 EUR x (0.87784 +0.87798)/2 = 289.71 GBP

The margin required for this trade in your home account currency is 289.71 GBP.

If you were to trade 10,000 units of EUR/USD, which has a 3.3% margin requirement, the margin required is 330 EUR.

(3.3% / 100%) x 10,000 units of EUR/USD = 330 EUR

Because the currency pair EUR/USD does not have British pounds in it, we must convert 330 EUR to GBP at the live midpoint EUR/GBP exchange rate. For this example, we can suppose the midpoint exchange rate is 0.87791.

330 EUR x 0.87791= 289.71 GBP

The margin required for this trade in your home account currency is 289.71 GBP.