FX Market Structure and Where Prices Come From

FX has no central exchange, so the price you see is an aggregate of primary venue quotes and bilateral dealer streams.

Foreign exchange has no central exchange, so a price for EUR/USD is an aggregate of quotes streamed from a small set of primary venues and a much larger set of bilateral relationships between banks, market makers and their clients, rather than one number set in one place. Understanding where that aggregate comes from explains why the market trades around the clock on business days, why liquidity concentrates during the London and New York overlap hours, and why a retail quote can differ meaningfully from an institutional one for the same currency pair at the same instant.

Equities trade on named exchanges with a consolidated tape, and a share has one official last price at any moment because a regulator requires reporting to a central record. FX has never worked this way. The market is a network of dealers, largely banks and a handful of non-bank market makers such as Jump Trading, XTX Markets and Citadel Securities, quoting prices to each other and to clients over private connections. No regulator aggregates every trade into one public tape, so the price of a currency pair is a convergence of many nearly identical prices across that network rather than a single quoted truth.

This matters for how you think about a fill. A trader executing a large order does not hit one order book. They route across multiple venues and bilateral counterparties, and the price they receive depends on who they ask, when they ask, and how much size they show.

Two platforms, EBS and Refinitiv Matching, historically carried a large share of interbank spot trading in the major pairs, with EBS particularly dominant in USD/JPY and EUR/CHF. Multi-dealer platforms such as FXall and 360T aggregate quotes from several bank liquidity providers for corporate and institutional clients who want to compare prices before executing, functioning as a request-for-quote layer on top of the underlying dealer network.

Non-bank market makers now provide a large share of quoted liquidity on these primary venues and directly to banks through prime brokerage relationships, a structural shift from a market once dominated almost entirely by bank dealing desks. A trader comparing prices across these venues has to account for the fact that each one draws liquidity from a slightly different pool of counterparties.