Total return swap

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Total return swap, or total rate of return swap, or TRORS, a contract in which one party receives interest payments on a reference asset plus any capital gains and losses over the payment period, while the other receives a specified fixed or floating cash flow unrelated to the credit worthiness of the reference asset, especially where the payments are based on the same notional amount. The reference asset may be any asset, index, or basket of assets. TRORS are particularly popular on bank loans, which do not have a liquid repo market.

The TRORS, then, allows one party to derive the economic benefit of owning an asset without putting that asset on its balance sheet, and allows the other (which does retain that asset on its balance sheet) to buy protection against loss in its value.

The essential difference between a TRORS and a credit default swap is that the latter provides protection not against loss in asset value but against specific credit events. In a sense, a TRORS isn’t a credit derivative at all, in the sense that a CDS is. A TRORS is funding-cost arbitrage.

Hedge funds are using Total Return Swaps to obtain leverage on the Reference Assets: they can receive the return of the asset, typically from a bank (which has a funding cost advantage), without having to put out the cash to buy the Asset. They usually post a smaller amount of collateral upfront, thus obtaining leverage.