Interest rates prices

The LIBOR – or London Interbank Offered Rate – is a standard interest rate, used as the benchmark for calculating further rates on a range of loans across the globe. It’s calculated daily by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which asks a range of banks for the interest rates they’d charge each other for a short-term loan. It then takes the average of these, which forms the daily LIBOR figure.

This is calculated in five currencies – the US dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen and Swiss Franc – and for a range of different lengths of loan. There are therefore 35 different LIBOR figures posted each day, which are used by financial companies around the world to calculate their own rates.

An interest rate derivative is a financial derivative product (in the case of IG Bank, a CFD) whose value is determined by the movement in a particular interest rate.