We’re transparent with our pricing
We always strive to be as open and clear as possible. Here you cansee exactly how we derive our prices and what we do with your money.
Where we source our prices
For CFD and products on an exchange-traded instrument, we source our prices through a combination of:
- relevant primary exchanges
- alternative liquidity venues
We also consume feeds from our parent company, StoneX Group, who specialise in institutional-grade financial services networks. These feeds are not available to other brokers and are just another reason how we can provide you with superior pricing and liquidity.
For assets such as FX where the underlying is an OTC (over-the-counter) Instrument, we have relationships with several Tier 1 Banks as well as multiple Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs). They provide us with liquidity from around the globe (including London and New York), and in some cases the total number of providers can reach up to 12 liquidity sources.
Furthermore, we periodically review our liquidity sources to ensure that we continue to offer you the best prices.
How we deliver our prices
Whether it’s for our retail, institutional or corporate clients, we have a variety of channels to deliver prices. They include:
- Mobile app
- Our web trading platform
- MetaTrader for technical users
- FIX API for institutions
Our delivery mechanisms push prices out rapidly and automatically adapt to the connection speed of each client. This enables us to provide the highest possible frequency of updates without jamming the communication line. For our mobile and web offering, we use LightStreamer technology.
How liquidity affects our prices
Our state-of-the-art systems stream continuously tradable prices within the published trading hours for the specific product. However, some products are inherently illiquid and even liquid products sometimes undergo periods of illiquidity.
For a given underlying asset, we offer a variety of products that have different characteristics, each suited to a different profile of client:
Fixed spreads
Regardless of underlying spreads which could be wide due to lack of liquidity, we offer a constant spread which gives you the comfort and assurance of paying a known cost any time you trade.
Variable spreads
Our product passes on market conditions to you where the spread widens and tightens with available liquidity in the market.
Capped variable spreads
This is a blend of the other two, where you receive the benefit of tighter spreads during periods of high liquidity, but are also protected against excessive spreads in illiquid times.
In addition to this, there are occasions when illiquidity is so severe that prices in the market are completely withdrawn, Also, if the spreads are extremely wide, we will temporarily disable trading products by continuing to show the client the current price but clearly displaying it as an indicative price.
How we price our markets
We act as a market maker for all our products. They are always simple to understand and trade, but the methodology used to price them ranges from the straightforward to the complex.
The price discovery for simple products mainly involves capturing the best liquidity and delivering them to you with minimal latency.
Where we offer synthetic products, we push the prices of relevant instruments traded in the markets into proprietary pricing models and arbitrage calculators to create a stream of verified prices that you can confidently trade on.
How our prices compare to our competitors
We are a global company that uses liquidity from all over the world to serve our clients. We access liquidity and prices from our parent company StoneX Group, alongside the best possible institutional feeds. This makes our prices unique and spreads exceptionally tight.
The competitive landscape varies from region to region and we review our competitors weekly to ensure you are getting the best value.
We also cover a wide range of markets and our spread models (especially our fixed spreads) are often superior to the comparable models of our competitors.
What happens to your money?
We want you to have complete peace of mind that your funds are in safe hands. See how we protect your money from unforeseen events.
How does FOREX.com make money?
Our main source of revenue comes from the market spread. Just as a high-street retailer adds a little extra to the price when it buys stock from a wholesaler, the spread is how we charge you for the service we provide.
Put simply, you pay a little more for the buy price and receive a little less for the sell price.
If EUR/USD is trading in the market at 1.2164, our 1-point spread means it would have a buy price of 1.21645 and a sell price of 1.21635.
Hedging client positions
As we make most of our money from the spread, we do not directly profit when a client wins or loses.
Most of our client positions balance out with each other. For example, as one trader buys 1 lot of Wall Street CFDs, another sells a similar amount. This is called internalisation.
Sometimes there are cases where we see a lot of trades going the same way e.g. most of our clients buying a market. When this happens, we hedge to manage our risk. For example, if our traders were overwhelmingly buying Wall Street, we would hedge in the market with actual Dow 30 futures.