FX Market Adopts E-Trading Platforms

Sixty percent of the $621 billion inter-dealer market for global spot foreign exchange is traded electronically and that figure will increase to 90 percent in 2007, according to Celent Communications. A new partnership between Reuters and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to trade spot and futures side by side on the Reuters Dealing platform and a new platform from eSpeed should improve the electronic trading services offered to banks and provide competition to voice brokers, writes Celent senior analyst Jodi Burns in the report, "An Overview of the Cash Foreign Exchange Markets." Initiatives such as Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) and standardization of trade messages via the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) will contribute to the increase.

A second report profiles e-trading vendors in the cash forex markets, including the inter-bank platform, Reuters Dealing 3000 and EBS, as well as dealer-to-institution platforms - FX Connect, FXAll, Currenex, Hotspot FXi and 360T. According to the report, eSpeed FX targets banks and commodity trading advisers, while Lava FX plans to aggregate liquidity from multidealer platforms and institutional customers.

Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio