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LMAX Group blog - FX industry thought leadership

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  • New FX Venues Emerge

    Challenging the establishment – new FX venues emerge. David Mercer, LMAX Exchange CEO, shares insights.

    The first generation of FX electronic trading venues initially emerged in the interbank market in the early 1990s. Both Reuters and EBS have remained traditional powerhouses in the electronic FX market since their launches, supported by the dealing banks that relied on the two venues to manage their risk in a timely manner.

    The second wave of significant changes in the electronic FX market occurred during the late 1990s, when numerous electronic platforms surfaced to address trading issues in the client-to-dealer market. While most of those venues, such as Atriax, Lava, and FXMarketspace, ultimately ceased operations due to lack of market adoption, the few that survived, including Currenex, Hotspot FX, and FXall, form the backbone of today’s established FX ECN players.

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  • What will drive further adoption of electronic trading?

    Electronic trading execution methods (as defined by BIS) account for 55% of all spot trading, represented collectively by electronic broking (interbank), MDPs, and SDPs. Of the three electronic execution methods, interbank systems (i.e., EBS and Thomson Reuters) have one of the largest shares of the spot FX market, at 26%.

    Retail aggregators do not appear on this execution venue list because they are counted as bank clients in this BIS survey. Inter-broker dealers like ICAP and Tradition capture 47% of FX swap business (voice broker plus inter-dealer direct percentages) as well as 35% of FX options volume.

    When looking at electronic trading platforms, both single- and multibank platforms compete actively in two markets: FX spot and outright forward markets.

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