Daily Cut-Off

What Is the Daily Cut-Off?

In the forex market, the daily cut-off is a predetermined point in time set by a forex dealer to stand as the finish of the current trading day and the beginning of another trading day. This is finished for administrative, logistical, and financial reasons including accounting and bookkeeping, data integrity, and interest credits or debits.

Understanding the Daily Cut-Off

Although the forex market trades 24 hours every day, the market and its intermediaries require a predefined beginning and end to each trading day. This permits them to appropriately record trade dates and characterize settlement periods. It likewise establishes a moment in time where dealers will make or take payments in light of comparative interest rates of the currencies being traded.

Since the forex market is decentralized and did not depend on a physical or even virtually distinct location where trading is regulated, every individual forex dealer must implement this cutoff themselves. There is no regulation about when or how this ought to occur. For the reasons for data integrity and comparability across charting platforms, dealers naturally establish a daily cut-off like the change of the day in a significant time zone. But what is significant to one clientele may not be as significant to another, thus the differences between one dealer's picked daily cut-off and another dealer.

The daily cut-off date is important in that it sets the value date for the specific trade. Since spot trades are settled T+2, the trade date is required. For instance, in the scenario over, the trade done at 4:50 p.m. will have a settlement date of Jan. 2, accepting Jan. 1 and Jan. 2 are not ends of the week, and the trade done at 5:10 p.m., will settle the accompanying business day. Thus, despite the trades being just 20 minutes apart and around the same time they will settle on separate days.

Most currencies will have a daily cut-off of late afternoon eastern time that generally compares to midnight in the U.K. or on the other hand Europe. In any case, some emerging market currencies will cut-off prior in the day, particularly for those trades that are non deliverable.

Illustration of the Daily Cut-Off

For instance, let's say a forex dealer indicated that the daily cut-off was 5 p.m. consistently, and a trader placed two forex trades on the evening of Dec. 31 — one at 4:50 p.m. also, another at 5:10 p.m. Since the daily cut-off is 5 p.m., the first trade would be reserved as taking place on Dec. 31, while the second would be recorded as a Jan. 1 trade, taking place in another calendar year, since it took place after the daily cut-off. Envision another trader made the exact same trades at the exact same times, but with a different forex dealer who utilized a daily cut-off time one hour sooner. In this model, the first trader has records establishing trades in two different calendar years, while the subsequent trader has both trades in a similar calendar year. Such a distinction might be arbitrary, but as this model points out, it could have genuinely different tax results.

Highlights

• The daily cut-off is the time that forex dealers set that distinguishes the finish of one trading day from the outset of the next.
• The cut-off is typically like midnight in the European region, but may differ greatly relying upon the dealer's clientele.
• The cut-off is important to establish for record keeping purposes and for interest credits or debits, since forex markets often trade 24 hours per day.