Main Players In The Forex Market
Online Retail Broker-DealersIn the previous sections you have come to understand how the Forex market works. Now let's see how its inner workings can affect your trading by learning more about retail Forex brokers.
If you want to exchange one currency for another and make some profit, just like most individuals, you are unable to access the pricing available on the interbank market. You can't just barge into Citigroup or Deutsche Bank and start throwing Euros and Yen around, unless you are a multinational or hedge fund with millions of Dollars. To participate in the Forex, you need a retail broker, where you can trade with much inferior amounts.
Brokers are typically very large companies with huge trading turn over, which provide the infrastructure to individual investors to trade in the interbank market. Most of them are market makers for the retail trader, and in order to provide competitive two way prices, they have to adapt to the technological changes afoot in the industry, as we have seen above.
What does it mean to directly trade with a market maker? Every market maker has a dealing desk, which is the traditional method that most banks and financial institutions use.
The market maker interacts with other market maker banks to manage their position exposure and risk. Every market maker offers a slightly different price in a particular currency pair based on their order book and pricing feeds.
As trader, you should be able to produce gains independently if you are using a market maker or a more direct access through an ECN. But nevertheless, it's always essential to know what happens on the other side of your trades. To gain that insight, you first need to understand the intermediary function of a broker-dealer.
The interbank market is where Forex broker-dealers offset their positions, but not exactly the way banks do. Forex brokers don't have access to trading in the interbank through trading platforms like EBS or Reuters Dealing, but they can use their data feed to support their pricing engines. Enhanced price integrity is a major factor traders consider when dealing in off-exchange products, since most prices originate in decentralized interbank networks.
In order to quote prices to their costumers and offset their positions in the interbank market, brokers require a certain level of capitalization, business agreements and direct electronic contact with one or several market maker banks.
You know from chapter A01 that the Forex spot market works over-the-counter, which means there are no guarantors or exchanges involved. Banks wanting to participate as primary market makers require credit relationships with other banks, based on their capitalization and creditworthiness.
The more credit relationships they can have, the better pricing they will get. The same is true for retail Forex brokers: depending on the size of the retail broker in terms of capital available, the more favorable pricing and effectiveness it can provide to its clients. Usually this is so because brokers are able to aggregate several price feeds and always quote the tighter average spread to its retail customers. 1, 2, 3,