Clearing and Bookkeeping Processing for Forwards

CME Clearing currently offers clearing of privately-negotiated deals, submitted via CME ClearPort, in Cleared OTC London Gold Forward contracts.

In the near future, we expect to begin offering clearing for other types of forwards. Exactly as with futures, forwards may be cash-settled or physically-delivered.

This section outlines the basics of processing for forwards – what they are, how they work, how they differ from futures, etc.

Forwards and futures

A forward may be distinguished from a future as follows:

Liquidation versus no liquidation
With futures, you can liquidate your position simply by clearing an offsetting transaction, and with any counterparty. Sell the contract to party A, buy it back from party B, and you are out of the market. (Another commonly used term for this is multi-lateral position netting – you can net your positions together regardless of counterparty.)

With forwards, however, normally there is never any liquidation. All trades are held open, at original trade price, until contract maturity. (The exception is that you can do a tearup – more on this below.)
Cash mark-to-market versus collateralized mark-to-market
With futures, daily mark to market amounts are banked in cash. This is called settlement variation. (Sometimes you’ll see this referred to as variation margin.) Every new trade you clear is marked from trade price to that day’s end-of-day settlement price. Similarly, your start-of-day position is marked from the previous day’s end-of-day settlement price to today’s end-of-day settlement price. The net of all of these amounts is banked in cash.

With forwards, however, daily mark-to-market amounts are collateralized rather than banked. This means that we calculate the mark-to-market amounts on every open trade, from original trade price to the current day’s end-of-day settlement price. These amounts are discounted to present value and netted together, to yield either a net increment or decrement to your performance bond (“initial margin”) requirement.

So if you’ve lost money on your mark-to-market amounts, you’ll have to post more collateral, of any acceptable collateral type. If you’ve made money, your collateral requirement will be decreased, and you may be able to withdraw excess collateral.
Delivery at final settlement price versus delivery at original trade price
If you hold your position in a cash-settled futures contract to maturity, the position is simply marked to market one final time, the resulting settlement variation is banked, and the position is removed. For a physically-delivered futures contract, if you hold the position to maturity, it delivers at the final settlement price of the future.

For a physically-delivered forward contract, however, at maturity the position delivers at original trade price. Depending on the contract, this may be a gross delivery – each original trade delivers at its own original trade price. Or it may be a net delivery, where the delivery obligations for the open trades are netted together to yield a single net delivery obligation, at the net of original trade price.

For a cash-settled forward contract, the mark-to-market amounts on all open trades are calculated one final time, from original trade price to final settlement price. These amounts are netted together and then banked in cash.

Calculating mark-to-market amounts for open forward trades

The mark-to-market amount for an open trade in a forward contract is calculated as the product of four values:

The price difference: Current End-of-Day Settlement Price less Original Trade Price
The trade quantity, expressed as positive number for a buy or a negative number for a sell
The contract value factor – the multiplier for this contract that converts quoted prices to money amounts, and
The discount factor – the appropriate value to discount the mark to market amount from the contract’s maturity date back to present value.

The result is rounded normally to the precision of the currency in which the contract is denominated. (For example, for USD, GBP and EUR, to the nearest penny, and for JPY to the nearest yen.)

Discounting the mark-to-market amount back to present value is appropriate because the amount is collateralized. It won’t be realized in cash until contract maturity.

For example, for gold forwards: Suppose you sold 4,379 contracts at a price of 865.67 USD per troy ounce, and at the end of the current clearing day the settlement price is 895.55 USD per troy ounce. The contract value factor is 100 (because the contract is defined as being for 100 troy ounces), and suppose today’s discount factor is 0.98039. The discounted mark to market amount is calculated as the product of:

The price difference of 895.55 less 865.67
The trade quantity of negative 4,379
The contract value factor of 100, and
The discount factor of 0.98039.

The result is -12,827,865.8693, which is rounded to -12,827,865.87 USD. The collateralized mark-to-market amount for this trade will cause your performance bond requirement to increase by this amount.

Tear-up’s (liquidations prior to maturity) and transfers

A clearing firm that has two exactly offsetting transactions – same contract, same price, same quantity, opposite market side – may request that the two transactions be torn up. Upon such request, the two transactions will be removed.

Similarly, partial tear-up’s may be done. The original transaction and the offsetting transactions must be for the same value date and price. The quantity on the original transaction will be reduced, and the offsetting transaction will be removed entirely.

Two clearing firms wishing to tear up a trade between them, may do so upon request. Upon confirmation by both firms, the trade will be removed for both. If the firms desire, they may also specify a cash amount to be moved between them associated with the tear-up.

If a trade must be transferred from one clearing firm to another, a transfer transaction should be cleared at original trade price. Then, upon request by the original clearing firm, the original transaction and the offsetting transfer transaction will be removed.

All tear-up requests are handled via the CME ClearPort Facilitation Desk.

Regulatory status for forwards

Different types of forward contracts will of course have their own rules regarding their regulatory status. Generally, however, customer positions in forwards are considered “OTC contracts”, and are part of the 30.7 Secured regulatory class. (In the near term, we expect that these will transition over to a new “OTC” regulatory class.)

As such, these positions, and associated money and collateral deposits, must be kept separate from both “customer segregated” futures positions and money amounts, and proprietary (house) amounts.

In the clearing system, trades in forward products marked as “customer”, will be posted to a special position account denoted with a trailing “S” (for “30.7 Secured.”) Mark to market amounts and performance bond requirements will similarly be aggregated to a special “S” Customer Non-Segregated settlement account, and a separate pool of collateral assets will be deposited to meet those performance bond requirements.

PCS and account-level position reporting

Position Change Specification (“PCS”) data should be submitted at each settlement cycle for forwards as for any other product.

Depending on the product, account-level position reporting (“large trader reporting”) may also be required.

Performance bond calculations

Performance bond (“initial margin”) requirements are calculated for forwards using SPAN® exactly as for any other product.

There are some special considerations, however, regarding the recognition of risk offsets between customer positions in segregated futures versus 30.7 forwards. Rules may differ product by product, but as a general statement such risk offsets are not allowed.

For example, suppose a customer account is long in COMEX gold futures, and short in COMEX OTC London gold forwards. This risk offset may not be recognized, and the customer margin requirement for neither futures nor forwards may not be correspondingly reduced.

Note also that collateral deposited to meet customer-segregated margin requirements may not be used to meet either initial margin or collateralized mark-to-market requirements for 30.7 products, and vice versa.

Also, if a customer has a collateralized mark-to-market amount for a 30.7 product which is a credit (a net gain), this may be used to offset performance bond requirements only for such 30.7 Secured positions. If there is any excess credit, it cannot be used to offset requirements from normal customer-segregated futures positions.

Data formats

Rules will differ by product, but for most privately-negotiated deals in forwards captured via CME ClearPort, the trade type will be OPNT – short for over-the-counter privately-negotiated-trade.

Clearing firms will receive FIXML trade confirmation messages for cleared forward trades exactly as for any other contract. A few points to note about FIXML usage for forwards:

The security type attribute indicates that the product is a forward, not a future: SecTyp=”FWD”
Exactly as for futures, the MMY attribute provides the contract period code, and identifies the specific forward contract. Exactly as for futures, this will typically be a value specific either to the month or to the day. For example, MMY=”201012” (December 2010) or MMY=”20101223” (Dec 23, 2010).
Exactly as for futures, the MatDt attribute provides the clearing settlement date, ie, the date on which the final settlement price is determined. For example, MatDt=”2010-12-23”
For a physically-delivered forward contract, the delivery date (also called the physical settlement date or value date) is provided via the SettlDt attribute. For example, SettlDt=”2010-12-24”

In the FIXML Trade Register file produced each day, there will be TrdCaptRpt trade records for every open trade and PosRpt position records for every position:

On the trade records, the Amt element for type TVAR (trade variation) will contain the discounted mark-to-market amount – ie, the exact amount to be collateralized.
On the position records, the total net discounted mark-to-market amount will be in the Amt element for type CMTM, short for “collateralized mark to market”.

The discount factor to be used every day for each contract, used to discount mark-to-market amounts back to present value, is provided in both the daily FIXML Settlement Price File and in the daily SPAN file.

In the FIXML settlement price file, the discount factor is provided as a decimal fraction in the DiscntFctr attribute of the Full element. For example, for a gold forward, <Full Typ=”6” Px=”908.24” DiscntFctr=”0.98312” Mkt=”COMEX”/>. In this example, the end-of-day price is 908.24 USD per troy ounce, and the discount factor is 98.312 percent.
In the expanded-format SPAN file, the discount factor is provided as a decimal fraction on the type “B” record for each forward contract, in positions 152-163, with ten implied decimal places.

The maximum precision for a discount factor will be 0.00001 percent, or 0.0000001 as a decimal fraction.

Spreadsheet-format (CSV) files

Two spreadsheet-format files are made available daily to clearing firms with forward positions, for trades and positions. These are in addition to the standard FIXML-format Trade Register file.

The trade file contains the following data elements:

Clearing business date
Trade date
Clear date
Product exchange
Product type
Product code
Settlement currency
Contract value factor
Period code
Delivery date (value date for physical settlement)
Clearing settlement date (date final price is determined)
Buy/Sell code
Quantity
Discount factor
Settlement price
Trade price
Mark-to-market amount (discounted trade variation)
Physical Delivery amount
Cash Delivery amount
Clearing organization
Clearing member firm ID
Position account ID
Position account origin
Firm exchange
Trading Member Firm (TMF) ID
Trade origin
Broker
Customer account ID
Customer order ID
Firm trade ID

The position file contains the following data elements:

Clearing business date
Product exchange
Product type
Product code
Settlement currency
Contract value factor
Period code
Delivery date (value date for physical settlement)
Clearing settlement date (date final price is determined)
Long position
Short position
Discount factor
Settlement price
Trade price
Mark-to-market amount (discounted trade variation)
Physical Delivery amount
Cash Delivery amount
Clearing organization
Clearing member firm ID
Position account ID
Position account origin

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