Dealing Model
Best Execution
Providing market-leading pricing and execution is Markets Invest’s #1 purpose.
Best execution is about achieving the best possible result for our client's trades.
Oh yeah, and we provide detailed trade receipts for all of your trades. For the first time ever you’ll have access to the same level of transparency as institutional traders, including; which bank filled your trade, the slippage, speed, order book, and tick charts showing market impact.
Spreads
- We encourage price competitiveness between our 20+ trading counterparties through our unique ECN model. Our liquidity providers compress their spreads to compete for our clients flow.
- Our spreads rank amongst the tightest in the world across all FX, metals, indices and commodities products.
Our Most Popular Markets
| Symbol | Description | Min | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|
|
EUR/USD |
Euro vs United States Dollar |
0.0 |
0.1 |
|
AUD/USD |
Australian Dollar vs United States Dollar |
0.0 |
0.1 |
|
XAU/USD |
Gold vs United States Dollar |
0.0 |
12.8c |
|
XTI/USD |
WTI Crude Oil Spot vs United States Dollar |
1.6 |
1.6c |
|
GER30 |
DAX Germany 30 Index |
0.6 |
0.7 |
Integrity & Reliability
Price reliability and integrity are about ensuring that our prices are in line with market prices.
This means our market midpoint is in line with other providers or the underlying markets that the product is based on. This takes into consideration factors such as news events, rollover, periods of illiquidity, fair value, and so on.
- We source our prices from a diverse range of counterparties including over 20 different tier-1 banks, non-bank market makers and ECNs.
- We do not create our own price, i.e. we simply stream the prices that we receive from our trading counter-parties. This means our clients orders are never visible to our trading counter-parties - completely negating this potential conflict of interest.-
- We review our prices relative to other providers. For products where we do not have an ‘aggregated’ price and therefore the price is more susceptible to manipulation, e.g. Indices CFDs, we take factors such as fair value and skew into consideration to ensure the fairness and competitiveness of our prices.
- We regularly review all trading counterparties and are always adding new ones to improve our pricing and execution. See the trading counterparties section for more information.
Rejection Rates
- We execute all orders as limit orders. This means we put a zero price tolerance on orders that are sent to our trading counter-parties. While this should result in a higher rejection rate, the high fill ratio from our liquidity providers of greater than 90%, keeps our rejection rates and slippage low.
- Our deep and diverse liquidity ensures that an order which is rejected by one liquidity provider can be filled by another. This is how our rejection rates can remain at around 1% while our individual liquidity provider rejections are <10%.
Our Average Rejection Rates
| Market | Q1-19 | Q2-19 | Q4-19 | Q3-19 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Forex |
4.52%* |
1.78% |
1.78% |
1.52%
|
|
Commodities |
1.48% |
0.70% |
0.40% |
0.38% |
|
Indices |
1.27% |
0.27% |
0.49% |
1.46% |
Slippage
- Slippage generally occurs for 2 reasons, either due to a delay between an action and its execution or due to a lack of liquidity depth resulting in VWAP (volume weighted average price) slippage. Markets Invest is dedicated to ensuring minimal slippage for all of its clients.
- Our extensive and diverse liquidity mix enables us to hold our trading counter-parties to a high standard. We maintain fill ratios with individual LPs of greater than 90% and use ‘no last look’ when supported for improved execution and reduced slippage on your trades.
- Markets Invest selects its technology providers very specifically to ensure the highest quality for its clients. By maintaining a close relationship with all technology providers and through constant monitoring and reporting we are able to refine our trading environment to reduce slippage across the board.
- We pass on all price improvements so our positive and negative slippage is symmetrical.
Slippage statistics
| Market | Positive | At Price | Negative |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Forex |
19.56% |
66.86% |
13.58%
|
|
Commodities |
12.87% |
67.43% |
19.70%
|
|
Indices |
25.84% |
51.65% |
22.51%
|
Markets Invest removes the potential conflict of interest between the best execution of your trades and our profitability.
- Run a B-book or make money from client losses.
- Receive any form of profit share from a group entity relating to our clients trading losses, i.e. no other company runs a B-book on our behalf.
- Have arrangements with trading counterparties to run a B-book on our behalf.
- Our trading is fully automated, i.e. ‘No Deal Desk’. We have no human discretionary traders and we do not make hedge execution decisions based on client trading behaviour or account profitability.
- Make proprietary trades or hold proprietary risk positions.
While this information doesn’t form part of our client agreement, this is information that we expect to be held to account for, and which we are always happy to verify, as all brokers should.
Small Trades
Due to ticket fees imposed on the execution of small trades by our prime broker, forex trades less than 50,000, XAU trades less than or equal to 30oz are executed internally by Markets Invest and batch hedged once the position size exceeds the prime broker minimum. This means Markets Invest will take the other side of the trade until the position grows to greater than 100,000, or an opposing trade comes in from another client.
These interbank minimum ticket fee charges are standard across all FX market participants who trade via ‘prime broker’ and the process of batch hedging small tickets to avoid excessive clearing charges is also commonplace.
Rules per asset class
| Asset Class | Pricing | Execution | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Forex |
ECN
Tier-1 banks, non-bank market makers and institutional ECNs |
STP | NDD
Trades are executed back-to-back with LPs |
FX Trades < 50,000 are executed internally and batch hedged. |
|
Metals |
ECN
Tier-1 banks, non-bank market makers and institutional ECNs |
STP | NDD |
XAU trades <= 30oz are executed internally and batch hedged.
|
|
Indices |
Non-bank market makers |
STP | NDD*
Trades are executed back-to-back with CFD LPs |
|
|
Energies |
Non-bank market makers |
STP | NDD*
Trades are executed back-to-back with CFD LPs |
|
Trading Counterparties
As an ECN, STP, and NDD broker, our focus is to find the best trading counterparties for your trades.
Markets Invest executes all trades on a back-to-back, 1:1 basis, with the group parent Deutschtrader Ltd. Markets Invest maintains all prime broker and trading relationships for the group. Markets Invest Ltd executes trades with the trading counterparties below for Markets Invest.
When you request a trade receipt from Markets Invest, one of these trading counterparties will always feature – assuming the trade is above the interbank minimum.
- We review our prices relative to other providers. For products where we do not have an ‘aggregated’ price and therefore the price is more susceptible to manipulation, e.g. Indices CFDs, we take factors such as fair value and skew into consideration to ensure the fairness and competitiveness of our prices.
- We regularly review all trading counterparties and are always adding new ones to improve our pricing and execution.
Rules per asset class
| Banks | Non-bank Market Makers |
|---|---|
|
BARCLAYS BANK PLC |
XTX Markets
|
|
BNP PARIBAS |
HC Tech |
|
COMMERZBANK AG |
Citadel Securities
|
|
CREDIT SUISSE |
Jump Trading
|
|
GOLDMAN SACHS |
Vidarr Capital
|
|
HSBC |
Virtu
|
|
Natwest |
LMAX |
|
STANDARD CHARTERED BANK |
|
|
UBS AG EB |
|
| Brokers/Prime of Primes | Institutional ECNs & Aggregators |
|---|---|
|
CFH |
FlexTrade |
|
CMC |
HotSpot
|
|
Exante |
Currenex |
|
|
Fastmatch
|
|
|
Content |
We trade with you as principal
When you trade with Markets Invest, we execute your trades as principal since we issue the product to you, i.e. we are the financial services provider giving you the product.
This legal relationship does not mean your trade is not executed by one of the group’s liquidity providers, it just means that Markets Invest is the legal counterparty to your trade. This legal relationship will be the same wherever you trade unless the broker is an ‘agent’, i.e. They’re a middleman between you and the real broker, who you will trade with as principal. This is generally how OTC markets operate.
Markets Invest cannot act as an agent between a trader and the market since this would require the trader to have a relationship with the prime broker, which they could not do without tens of millions of capital behind them. Markets Invest can and do facilitate such arrangements for institutional traders that have their own prime broker.
Who is the counterparty on your trades?
Markets Invest is the legal counterparty to all of your trades. We are the financial services provider issuing the product to you and we are trading with you as the principal.
Markets Invest offsets 100% of its market risk with Markets Invest Ltd which in turn offsets most of this risk with its trading counterparties – banks, non-banks, and ECNs. See the small trades section above for how small trades are executed.
Despite the fact that we are the counterparty to your trades, we are always able to demonstrate which liquidity provider filled your trades and this is the core difference between Markets Invest’s ECN, STP, and NDD business model and 99.99% of other brokers.
Frequently Asked Questions
When you place a trade at Markets Invest, that trade is offset with one of our hedge counter-parties. A hedge counter-party is an entity who Markets Invest trades with, to fill your trades. This basically means that your trade is matched via our ECN and hedged with our liquidity providers simultaneously.
Best execution refers to our continued efforts to create the ultimate trading environment for clients. This takes the form of our team’s commitment to ensuring we can provide clients with a seamless trading experience that combines competitive spreads, swaps and execution speeds with industry leading reliability and infrastructure.
We achieve this by holding our 26 + LP’s to high standards and ensure that they are pricing us their most competitive offering. Our unique ECN model enables LP’s to compress their spread and compete for clients’ flow. This has resulted in our spreads ranking amongst the tightest in the world across all FX and metals, indices and commodities products.
We ensure integrity and reliability by holding our counter-parties to a very high standard and we strive to ensure our prices are always in line with the market. Accordingly, our market mid point is in line with other providers or the underlying market off which it is based.
Our industry leading liquidity pool enables us to provide substantial market depth and a diverse range of liquidity. This has translated into an incredible 99% fill rate with as little as 1% of orders being rejected.