To many Foreign Exchange traders, few things cause more uneasiness than their choice of an online Forex broker. The prevailing sentiment is that whenever you attempt to make money in Forex you are plying your talent against ‘the market’ and that’s the only enemy you should be thinking about. The truth is, there is a lot more to it; the company who is honoring your trade can greatly affect how successful you are.

Most people stay away from what are known as Bucketshops; companies that give inaccurate prices, seem to manipulate prices to help themselves, and actually work to the detriment of their own clients. Such a practice (although the majority insist they would never do such a thing) amounts to an ethical conundrum which of course helps them and to the detriment of their clients. Another phrase often used for this kind of companies is ‘Market Makers’. They are creating the market their clients trade in, rather than relaying these positions over to the real market. A truthful examination of the market of currency, however, lets us see that this practice is truly essential to letting small retail trades to be placed, and even though it can be.

The reason for this is because there is no real ‘Forex market’, such as there is with typical kinds of investment. Commercial stocks, as an example, are available on a physical exchange like the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ in the United States. Exchanges like these are regulating bodies who qualify every company to be listed, lay out the specifics of the stock trading contracts, regulate brokers, and ultimately clear all trades financially. Stock exchanges establish the daily hours of trading and can decide whether any stock or brokerage should be expelled or shut down as the result of policies that could harm the broader market. These exchanges exist at real brick and mortar addresses and are themselves regulated by governmental agencies.

By contrast, the Foreign Exchange market is just the totaled trade activity of corporations who need to convert funds from a specific currency to that of another country. The real Forex market consists of large multinational businesses and international banks who shift currency about for the purpose of manifesting international trade. If a Japanese company sells goods in America, it will likely get the payment in the form of US Dollars, but it must pay its own costs in the form of Japanese Yen, such that it has to be able to change a huge amount of currency on a regular basis. Businesses of this type and the banks they use to transfer the currency are the real market, and small time traders are not able to be involved in this sphere; they simply don’t have the significant amounts of capital that are of interest to the real currency players.

That’s the reason why retail foreign currency exchange brokers buy and sell with their own customers. They open up manageable trading opportunities for the under capitalized players (such as us) who might otherwise never be able to participate in the Forex market. Then they turn around and make much greater trades with their ‘Liquidity Provider’ which is a financial institution that is able to trade directly with brokers in order to make some profit from we retail traders. The major banks are capable of trading with a broker that represents many smaller traders despite the fact that they would not ever consider trading with each and every single one. But when a broker lumps many trades into a larger transaction, trading opportunities abound.


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So, a retail broker give out price values to its clients, but there’s no central exchange which assures the prices at any given time. Each foreign currency exchange broker has to start with quotes provided to it by its liquidity provider(s) which are not assured to be identical to those given by other banks. Those differences are evident in the variation between broker quotes. From this point comes the requirement for a broker to make the market for its clients, not necessarily from a want to cheat them (although there will be those who most likely do). A ethical broker will not endeavor to make money from its clients by manipulating prices, but it has to nonetheless take the other side of its customers’ trades in order to fill them.

Therefore, in summary, we have seen that many retail brokerages are required to take the opposite side of all except the most substantial of their customers’ positions, however they should not use this to unethically trade to make them lose. This makes for a significant case of ‘caveat emptor’ – that is, let the client be careful. Every trader – and those seeking to learn Forex – must thoughtfully pick their broker and must diligently keep an eye on the trade and price activities to ensure that they are being handled in an equitable way. In all fairness, in any case, each client should recognize that the brokerage must trade against them and they shouldn’t assume a nefarious motivation. It’s an indispensable, albeit somewhat troublesome feature of the retail Forex business model.