Dealing Model
INVEST ECN ADVANTAGE
Best Execution & Lower Cost
The Markets Invest ECN offers cutting-edge and high-performance technology while leveraging our ten years of trading relationships to give you direct and anonymous access to a truly unique and diversified mix of liquidity.
- Automated trade receipts
- Completely anonymous trading
- Fast fills and low slippage
- Institutional grade liquidity
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. Oh yeah, and we provide detailed trade receipts for all of your trades.
What does ECN mean?
Electronic Communications Networks or ‘ECNs’ are off-exchange execution venues that allow market participants to trade with a range of counter-parties anonymously. They are the main trading venues for OTC markets such as Foreign Exchange and Metals.
This basically means ECNs provide the technology and venue for price makers aka ‘liquidity providers’ to distribute their liquidity. Price takers (traders) can see these prices and execute trades against them. The ECN is therefore responsible for prices/quotes and the execution of orders.
Institutional ECNs can be accessed through a prime broker while retail ECNs can be accessed through a retail forex broker. There are different characteristics to each, however, they both provide access to the interbank foreign exchange market. If you’re not getting direct (STP) access to interbank liquidity then you’re not trading via an ECN.
Characteristics of institutional and retail ECNs
- Central limit order book (CLOB) allowing trading as price maker or price taker.
- Basically an OTC version of an exchange that uses external liquidity from banks and other market makers for a diverse and competitive liquidity mix.
- Trades are executed anonymously
- The ECN is responsible for matching trades done between participants.
- Institutional ECN examples: HotSpot FX, FXALL, EBS, FastMatch and TraderTools.
- Quote driven order book where traders can trade as (price) taker only.
- Multiple bank and non-bank liquidity providers ‘aggregated’ into a best bid / best offer, and streamed to traders for them to execute against (as taker).
- Trades are executed anonymously.
- Orders are executed with liquidity providers and not B-booked.
- The broker does not run a B-book or make money from traders' losses.
Institutional + Retail
Markets Invest entered a strategic joint venture with Institutional ECN provider ‘TraderTools’ in 2020 and now offers this as a standalone product to its institutional clients.
- This partnership makes Markets Invest one of the world’s only institutional and retail broker ECNs.
- Markets Invest can provide direct ECN access to any of these institutional ECNs via FIX API or GUI - for institutional clients only.
Is Markets Invest really an ECN broker?
- Markets Invest aggregates liquidity from tier-1 banks, non-bank market makers and (institutional) ECNs.
- All Markets Invest trades that exceed our prime broker minimum are executed with a liquidity provider.
- Since we back-to-back hedge all trades and don’t internalise any risk (excluding small tickets which are batch hedged), plus we provide trade receipts to prove exactly how every order was executed and with whom, we’re confident we’re doing the right thing by our clients and delivering a genuine ‘retail broker ECN’.
- Please contact us if you feel differently on the topic.
Trade receipts showing ‘True’ ECN execution
Markets Invest provides automated trade receipts for all of your trades so you can see which bank executed your trade, fill speed, slippage, the full order book, and even a tick chart for market impact.
Trade receipts are a tool to empower our traders to make better trading decisions using the same information institutional traders rely on. This is just another way we’re leveling the playing field for the betterment of all retail traders.
Markets Invest ECN vs Market Maker or ‘ECN pricing’
| Markets Invest ECN | Market maker or ‘ECN Pricing’ | |
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No conflict of interest between you making money and broker profitability? |
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Wants clients to trade profitably? |
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Does not make money from your losses? |
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Does not make hedge execution decisions based on client trading behaviour or account profitability? |
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Does not benefit from wider spreads causing stop out of retail traders. |
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Does not benefit from interbank stop hunting. |
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Frequently Asked Questions
Our cutting edge ECN technology enables us to leverage 10 years of trading relationships to provide clients anonymous access to a unique and diverse pool of liquidity.
This means that you can rest assured that we have built the ultimate trading environment that couples industry leading technology with years of trading experience which has culminated in Markets Invest being recognised as the ‘traders brokerage’.
An exclusively ECN broker is beneficial as it means that you can focus on your trading and not your broker. In an industry that is full of brokers whose models are predicated on profiting from clients losses, our true ECN model stands in stark contrast to these practices by providing for accountability, transparency and honesty including post trade transparency.
There is no conflict of interest between Markets Invest and our clients. Why? Because we do not profit from clients losses. Our goal is to serve the clients needs before our own by delivering the best product to our clients. On the contrary, when you win, we win.
Unequivocally, No.
No, your personal identity is completely anonymous to our LP’s.
STP = straight through processing, which means that your trades are executed automatically by way of our ECN with no manual intervention.
NDD = No dealing desk which refers to a broker that does not market make rather, by way of our ECN we provide clients access to our network of LP’s, enabling every trade to be taken to the real market.