IC Markets Margin, Pip Value and Swap Free Holding Fee, Worked From Pakistan
Banded leverage, a 50% stop out, and the flat overnight charge that replaces swap - plus the two currency conversions a rupee budget meets before any of it applies.
Open IC Markets Account →Margin, pip value and the Swap Free overnight holding fee are three separate sums, and only the first two are what people usually mean by a margin calculator. This page runs all three off the published banded leverage - 1:5000 over the first 25 lots on MetaTrader, cut in stages above that - and the 50% stop out, read on 2 September 2026.
The fourth sum, which no calculator does
Every output below lands in USD or another of the ten base currencies. PKR is not one of them, and the published funding list carries no Pakistani rail, so a rupee budget reaches the account only after passing through at least one rate the broker does not set and does not publish. That conversion is the sum this calculator cannot do for you, and it is usually larger than the commission line people worry about instead.
What this page is not
An independent working, not the broker's own tool, and not advice. CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money.
Three calculations, and the conversion step Pakistan adds
The published arithmetic is the same in Karachi as anywhere else. What Pakistan adds sits on either side of it: a currency the account cannot hold, and a payment leg a circular already addresses.
- Leverage arrives in bands: 1:5000 over the first 0-25 lots, 1:3000 from 25 to 50, 1:1000 above that on MetaTrader, and a flat 1:1000 on cTrader, read on 2 September 2026.
- The 50% stop out is identical on every account type, and it is measured on equity in the base currency.
- Every figure here comes out in USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD or CAD - the ten the broker offers, none of which is the rupee.
- On Swap Free the swap line becomes a flat per-lot overnight charge instead: USD 62 on gold, USD 26 on GBPCHF, USD 25 on US30, USD 16 on GBPJPY, USD 15 on EURCHF, USD 11 on EURUSD, USD 9 on silver and AUDCAD.
- Above every line of arithmetic sits SBP EPD Circular Letter No. 08 of 2022, which treats remitting funds to an offshore CFD platform as a breach of section 4(1) of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act and instructs banks to identify and block those payments.
- Read every output as an estimate rather than a promise. CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money.
The order these costs actually arrive in
Comparison pages usually rank cost by commission, which for a Pakistani account is the wrong end of the list. Take a single gold lot held for ten nights on a Swap Free account: the commission is USD 7.00 for the round turn, the overnight charge is USD 620, and the currency conversions on the way in are unpublished and paid twice. The commission is the smallest of the three by a wide margin, and it is the only one most tables show.
No PKR conversion rate is published here, because PKR is not among the ten base currencies the account can hold. Whatever rate a payment instrument applies sits outside every figure on this page - and SBP EPD Circular Letter No. 08 of 2022 addresses that payment before any exchange-rate question arises.
The three sums, and the currency they land in
Margin is the slice of equity a position freezes while it is open. Pip value turns price movement into money. The Swap Free holding fee is the flat per-lot charge that replaces swap interest overnight, published symbol by symbol - USD 62 on gold, USD 25 on the US30 index, USD 11 on EURUSD, USD 9 on silver. All three land in USD or one of the other nine base currencies, and none of the ten is PKR.
A worked margin example using the published tiers
Take three lots of gold, since gold is where the arithmetic bites hardest. One lot is 100 ounces, so at an illustrative USD 4,300 an ounce three lots carry USD 1,290,000 of notional. Three lots sit entirely inside the first leverage band, so margin is USD 1,290,000 divided by 5000, or USD 258.
Now hold it
Ten nights on a Swap Free account costs three lots multiplied by USD 62 multiplied by ten nights, which is USD 1,860 - roughly seven times the margin that opened the position, and about nine round turns of Raw Spread commission per lot per night at USD 7.00 the round turn. The same shape appears on a single EURUSD lot: USD 110,000 of notional at 1.1000 locks USD 22 of margin in the top band, while the holding fee is USD 11 a night, so two nights of carry equals the entire margin requirement.
Where the bands actually start to matter
Size is what moves you out of the 1:5000 band. A 30-lot EUR/USD position at 1.1000 puts the first 25 lots at 1:5000, locking USD 550, and the remaining 5 lots at 1:3000, locking USD 183.33 - USD 733.33 in total, against the USD 660 a flat headline ratio would suggest.
And then the window moves
Higher Margin Requirement windows raise the figure temporarily: daily from thirty minutes before the close until fifteen minutes after the next open, at weekends from an hour before the Friday close until thirty minutes after the Monday open, and around major releases from fifteen minutes before to one minute after. Translated into PKT, the daily window sits near 01:30 to 02:15 in the morning and the weekend one opens around 01:00 on a Saturday - both while Pakistan is asleep.
The two conversions no calculator here can price
A rupee risk budget has to cross into the account base currency before a single line above applies, and there are two rate steps in that crossing rather than one. The published funding list settles cards in AUD, USD, JPY, EUR, NZD, SGD, GBP or CAD and wires in those plus CHF; none of the fifteen listed rails carries PKR, and none of them is Pakistani. So the rupee converts once into whatever the payment instrument settles in, and again if that currency is not the base currency the account was opened in.
What two legs are worth in real money
Neither rate is published by the broker, which charges no deposit fee of its own and takes no responsibility for third-party costs. Work it as a proportion instead: one percent on each leg of a USD 500 transfer is USD 5 per leg, USD 10 in total - more than the USD 7.00 round-turn commission on a full Raw Spread lot, spent before a single order exists. On a small account the conversion is the dominant cost and the commission is the rounding error, which is the reverse of how most comparison pages present it.
The step before the rate question
All of that assumes the transfer happens at all. SBP EPD Circular Letter No. 08 of 2022 treats the remittance itself as a breach of section 4(1) of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act and directs banks to identify and block it, which is a question about permission rather than about price.