Hold a position past the close and you pay for the privilege — but the two instruments bill you in completely different shapes. One deducts a charge from your account every night; the other never sends a bill at all, because it already priced the carry in.
Two ways to charge for holding time
Leverage isn’t free. When you hold a leveraged position overnight, someone is financing the exposure you didn’t fully fund, and that cost has to land somewhere. The CFD model deducts it nightly as an explicit swap (financing) adjustment. The futures model never deducts anything — the cost is embedded in the contract’s price relative to spot, so you pay it through the price you entered, not a daily line item.
Same economic idea, two very different mechanics — and the difference matters a lot if you hold trades for days rather than minutes.
CFD overnight financing: a daily, provider-set swap
On a CFD, each position open at the provider’s rollover time gets a swap applied — a credit or (usually) a debit calculated from a benchmark rate plus or minus the provider’s markup, scaled by your notional and direction. Hold for ten nights, you pay roughly ten of those charges. Hold over a weekend and many providers triple the charge to cover the non-trading days.
Two things about it are worth naming plainly:
- It’s provider-set. The benchmark is public, but the markup around it is the provider’s, and the direction of the adjustment isn’t symmetric — the debit you pay to hold is typically larger than any credit you’d receive.
- It compounds silently. For a swing or position trader, a small nightly swap on a leveraged CFD can quietly outgrow the trade’s actual profit target over a couple of weeks.
For short intraday trading, none of this bites — you’re flat by the close, so there’s no swap at all. That’s part of why CFDs remain a reasonable tool for fast, in-and-out styles.
Futures: financing baked into the forward price
A future has no nightly swap. Instead, the contract’s price already reflects the cost of carry — interest, plus storage or dividends depending on the underlying — over the time until expiry. That’s why a futures price usually sits slightly above or below spot: the market has priced the carry in, transparently, through the forward curve that every participant sees.
- When futures trade above spot, the market is in contango; below spot, backwardation.
- As expiry approaches, the futures price converges toward spot, so the embedded carry bleeds out over the life of the contract rather than being deducted each night.
The key structural feature: this carry is priced by the whole market on a centrally-cleared exchange, not set for you privately by a dealer. You can read it straight off the curve.
| CFD swap | Futures carry | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Daily deduction from the account | Embedded in the entry price |
| Who sets it | Provider (benchmark + markup) | The market, via the forward curve |
| Visibility | Posted per position, varies nightly | Observable in the spot-vs-future basis |
| Weekend handling | Often charged at ~3× | Already in the price; no daily event |
| Rolling | Not applicable | Roll to the next contract near expiry |
Rolling instead of paying a nightly bill
Because a future expires, holding “indefinitely” means rolling — closing the expiring contract and opening the next-dated one before it settles. You pay the spread and commission of that roll a handful of times a year, not a swap every night. For a longer-horizon position, a few roll costs can total far less drag than nightly financing on the equivalent CFD — but it’s a real, scheduled task, not an automatic one. Miss a roll and you risk being carried into settlement.
What this means for funded traders
Match the financing model to your holding period:
- Pure intraday → CFD swap never applies; financing is a non-issue on either side.
- Multi-day swing / position → the transparent, mostly one-off cost of carry on futures often beats a compounding nightly CFD swap — provided you manage the roll.
Either way, model the drag before you hold. Use the futures contract calculator to price a roll’s spread-and-commission in dollars per contract, and fold your realistic holding cost into the expectancy calculator so a “winning” swing setup isn’t quietly financed into a loser. If you’re weighing which venue fits your style at all, the prop firms directory lays out who offers what.
And whichever way you carry risk overnight, only your own tracked numbers reveal the true cost — Shibiki auto-journals every fill, roll and fee and reads it back as live edge health, so the financing drag shows up in your edge instead of hiding in the account balance.
Related: Futures contract calculator · Expectancy calculator · Prop firms directory