A futures contract which typically has an interest rate swap as underlying. It offers an instrumental tool for corporate treasurers, portfolio managers, and financial services institutions such as banks, insurance companies, etc, to hedge a wide variety of interest rate exposures. In other words, swap futures gives market participants with fixed-income issues (mortgage-backed securities, corporate bonds, etc) a means to hedge spread risk. More specifically, corporate treasurers can use swap futures to establish effective anticipatory hedges for fixed rate debts or floating rate debts that are intended to be swapped to fixed rate debts.
Swap futures contracts are usually based on 5-year, 10-year, and 30 year interest rate swaps.
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