What is Hedging?
Hedging is an increasingly popular terms in the investment markets. Though not many people actually enter into hedging, most of them have already heard of the term. In fact, to protect yourself, you should at least have the very basic knowledge of hedging. Therefore, let us now know more about hedging and a way to better protect you from risks.
As we have mentioned, hedge is a tool to reduce investment risk which is inherent to every investment. You can think in a way that hedge is sort of an insurance for your investment. When the risks you are facing are getting bigger and bigger, you are more in need of hedging. There are many different types of hedging that suits your different type of investments. You can find foreign currency swap, interest rate swap, futures hedging and hedging for stock price as the common ones.
The core objective for hedging is to reduce the risk instead of earns money. Therefore, what you would do is to invest in two products that are negatively correlated. In simpler term, that is when investment A earns money, investment B will lose money. The gain and the loss offset each other that your risk is minimized.
When the risk is higher, the earning or opportunity is likely to be higher, too. But, by hedging, the risk is reduced, therefore, the highest possible earning is also reduced. That means, when you are gaining on investment A, the gain is reduced by the loss in investment B. On the other hand, if you are making loss on investment A, the loss is reduced by gain in investment B.
To illustrate more clearly, we can now assume a case with interest rate swap. Assume that you have borrowed a $60,000 loan from a bank. No doubt, the bank will charge you interest say at LIBOR + 2%. As an interest payer, you must be concerned that the interest rate may increase. Therefore, you enter into an interest rate swap with the bank to receive a floating interest income at LIBOR + 2%.
As there is a tradeoff between risk and possible earnings, you can choose to what extend that you wish to reduce your risk. That means, you can enter into a $50,000 interest rate swap to minimize your risk or you can enter into a $25,000 interest rate swap to reduce part of your risk. For simplicity, we now assume you have entered into a $50,000 interest rate swap that you receive interest on floating rate.
When the market rate goes up, you have to pay more for the loan, but on the other hand, you receive more from the interest rate swap. On the other hand, if the interest rate goes down, you pay less, but you receive less as your interest income. To note that, hedging may not help you eliminate the risk but only reduce, therefore, you cannot expect that the interest pay out should be exactly the same as interest income.
Learn more about investment, visit: forex day trading system
Comments
Leave a Reply
