IC Markets Margin and Pip Value, Worked Through All Three Tiers (India)
A 60-lot position that crosses every leverage tier, the 50% stop out line it implies, and the rupee conversion no calculator on this site can perform for you.
Open IC Markets Account →A margin figure is only useful if it is computed the way the broker actually charges it. IC Markets charges per tier, so a position large enough to cross a tier boundary needs more margin than any single leverage ratio implies — this page works a 60-lot position through all three tiers, then adds the two lines calculators usually omit: the overnight holding fee on a Swap Free account and the rupee conversion that has to happen before a rupee budget means anything at all. Figures checked 2 September 2026. This is an independent page, not the broker's own tool, and CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money.
The order of operations, and where it leaves the fee schedule
Read the list below as an order of operations rather than a set of features. Two of the five steps are arithmetic the broker publishes; the other three happen outside its fee schedule entirely, which is precisely why they get skipped.
- Split the position by tier before dividing anything: lots 0-25 at 1:5000, lots 25-50 at 1:3000, lots above 50 at 1:1000 on MetaTrader, with cTrader capped at 1:1000 throughout.
- Halve the resulting margin figure to find the equity level at which liquidation begins: stop out is 50% on every account type.
- Add the overnight line if the position is held past rollover — on a Swap Free account that is a flat per-lot fee, as high as USD 62 a night on gold.
- Convert the result out of the base currency yourself: the ten on offer are USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD and CAD, and the rupee is not among them.
- Treat every figure as an estimate to be checked against your own terminal and your own bank statement — CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money.
There is no rupee rate inside any of this. The broker publishes ten base currencies and prices its own fees in them; whatever your card issuer or bank charges on the way in and out is a separate bill that arrives on a separate statement.
Three tiers in one position: the arithmetic worked in full
Most pages stop at the headline. IC Markets charges margin per tier, on the slice of the position that falls inside each one, and the broker's own published worked example uses USDCHF — so this page uses the same symbol, where one lot is a flat USD 100,000 of notional and the sum stays readable.
Take 60 lots of USD/CHF, USD 6,000,000 of notional. Lots 0-25 (USD 2,500,000) at 1:5000 require USD 500. Lots 25-50 (a further USD 2,500,000) at 1:3000 require USD 833.33. Lots 50-60 (the last USD 1,000,000) at 1:1000 require USD 1,000. Total margin USD 2,333.33 — against USD 1,200 if the 1:5000 headline applied to the whole position. The tier schedule nearly doubles the requirement, and it does so silently, because the headline number is the one that gets advertised.
Stop out is 50% on every account type, so that same position starts being liquidated when equity falls to USD 1,166.67. At an illustrative 88 rupees to the dollar, the margin locked is about 205,300 rupees and the liquidation line sits near 102,700 rupees — figures the calculator itself will never print, because it does not work in rupees.
Pip value, commission, and where Raw Spread and Standard actually meet
On a standard lot of EUR/USD a pip is USD 10, which lets commission be read as a spread. Raw Spread charges USD 3.50 per lot per side — USD 7.00 round turn, the same as 0.7 pips — on a broker-stated average EUR/USD spread of 0.1 pips. Standard charges nothing in commission and quotes from 0.8 pips. The two land at the same place, near 0.8 pips all-in, so the honest answer to which is cheaper is that on this pair they are not far apart; what differs is whether the cost shows up as one line on the statement or two.
cTrader Raw Spread charges USD 3.00 per USD 100,000 per side, a USD 6.00 round turn or about 0.6 pips. The early-access tiers go lower — Raw Pro at USD 1.50 per side (0.3 pips round turn) behind a USD 5,000 minimum, Raw Pro+ at USD 1.00 per side (0.2 pips) behind USD 100,000. Every one of those thresholds is a dollar figure that has to be bought with rupees before it can be met.
The overnight line most calculators leave out
A position held past rollover is charged again. On a Swap Free account the swap is replaced by a flat per-lot overnight holding fee published per symbol: USD 62 a night on gold (XAUUSD), USD 26 on GBPCHF, USD 25 on the US30 index, USD 16 on GBPJPY, USD 15 on EURCHF, USD 11 on EURUSD and USD 9 on silver. Multiply by lots and by nights before comparing it with the margin figure above — on a large position the holding fee over a week can exceed the margin the position locks. Swap Free is not cost-free, and IC Markets states it may withdraw the status without being obliged to explain why.
Rollover happens on the server's day, not yours. MetaTrader accounts sit in Equinix NY4 in New York, which runs 9 hours 30 minutes behind IST from March to November and 10 hours 30 minutes behind for the rest of the year; cTrader sits in London, 4 hours 30 minutes and 5 hours 30 minutes behind. A position that looks like it was held for one Indian calendar day can therefore be charged for two server nights, or none.
The rupee step the calculator cannot perform
None of the ten published base currencies — USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD, CAD — is the rupee, and IC Markets publishes no Indian funding route: local bank routes appear on its funding page for Thailand and Vietnam only. So a rupee risk budget has to cross into a base currency before any sum on this page applies, and that conversion is priced by a card issuer or a bank, not by the broker, which charges no deposit or withdrawal fee of its own.
The crossing happens twice, because withdrawals must return to the source of the deposit and a card withdrawal is capped at what that card put in. At an illustrative all-in mark-up of 1.5% each way, a risk budget of 200,000 rupees arrives worth about 197,000 and returns worth about 194,045 — close to 5,955 rupees, just under 3%, consumed by the round trip alone. Substitute your own statement rate: the figure above is an illustration of the shape of the cost, not a quote.
Read the RBI before the arithmetic
An Indian resident opening the account contracts with Raw Trading Ltd of Seychelles under FSA Securities Dealer licence SD018. IC Markets is entry 22 on the Reserve Bank of India's Alert List, revised 19 November 2025, and the RBI has stated that remittances for margin trading with an overseas counterparty are not a permitted purpose under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme — the Foreign Exchange Management Act channel most retail transfers use. Every number on this page assumes funds that have already arrived; whether they may arrive is a separate question, answered at rbi.org.in and not here. This page states no legal position, and CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money.
What each of the five sums actually answers
The five sums answer different questions and take different inputs. Margin answers how much equity a position immobilises while it is open, and at IC Markets it is the only one of the five that changes shape with position size, because the tier schedule bites. Pip value answers what one unit of price movement is worth. Profit and loss multiplies that by distance travelled and then subtracts commission and any overnight charge. Lot size runs pip value backwards, from a loss you have already decided you can accept to the size that produces it. Free margin is what remains after all of the above, and it is the number the 50% stop out is measured against.
A worked margin example using the published tiers
The worked example above uses the published tiers exactly as the broker states them, and there is one charge those tiers do not show. During a Higher Margin Requirement window the available leverage is temporarily capped, so the same position demands more margin than the schedule above implies. Those windows run daily from 30 minutes before the market close until 15 minutes after the open, at weekends from an hour before the Friday close until 30 minutes after the Monday open, and around high-impact news from 15 minutes before the release to one minute after it. They are anchored to market hours rather than to any Indian clock hour, which is why a position that was comfortable at 22:00 IST can be short of margin by 02:00 IST without the market having moved much at all.
Three account rules that change what a position costs to hold
One last check before trusting any output. Third-party payments are refused, so the account holder and the funding instrument must be the same person; withdrawals return to the source of the deposit, with card withdrawals capped at what that card deposited and anything above it going by another prior method or by bank wire; and a processing fee may be applied to a withdrawal if the deposited funds were never used for trading. None of those three appear in a margin sum, and all three change what a calculated position actually costs to enter and leave.