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Concept
Contract for difference
Summary
In finance, a contract for difference (CFD) is a legally binding agreement that creates, defines, and governs mutual rights and obligations between two parties, typically described as "buyer" and "seller", stipulating that the buyer will pay to the seller the difference between the current value of an asset and its value at contract time. If the closing trade price is higher than the opening price, then the seller will pay the buyer the difference, and that will be the buyer's profit. The opposite is also true. That is, if the current asset price is lower at the exit price than the value at the contract's opening, then the seller, rather than the buyer, will benefit from the difference.
Developed in Britain in 1974 as a way to leverage gold, CFDs have been trading widely since the early 1990s. CFDs were originally developed as a type of equity swap that was traded on margin. The invention of the CFD is widely credited to Brian Keelan and Jon Wood, both of UBS Warburg, on their Trafalgar House deal in the early 1990s.
Transmission congestion#Transmission rights
CFDs are different from financial transmission right (FTR) in two ways. First, a CFD is usually defined at a specific location, not between a pair of locations. Thus, CFDs are a tool principally for hedging temporal price risk – the variation in the nodal pricing or locational marginal pricing (LMP) over time at a specific location. Second, CFDs are not traded through regional transmission organizations (RTOs) markets. They are bilateral contracts between individual market participants.
CFDs were initially used by hedge funds and institutional traders to cost-effectively gain an exposure to stocks on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), partly because they required only a small margin but also, since no physical shares changed hands, they also avoided stamp duty in the United Kingdom.
It remains common for hedge funds and other asset managers to use CFDs as an alternative to physical holdings (or physical short selling) for UK listed equities, with similar risk and leverage profiles.
Official source
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