Marketplace : FX serves up a dish of connectivity spaghetti

First Published in e-Forex Magazine October 2009

Jon Vollemaere

co-Founder of FXecosystem

Jon Vollemaere, co-Founder of FXecosystem shares some thoughts on low latency trading for FX and some pasta recipes.

Where is the Foreign Exchange…?

Last year a colleague in the equities low latency game called and asked where the Foreign Exchange was located? He wanted a high-speed connection to it! After some explanation to him, I was struck by two thoughts. One, by my count there are at least 12 Banks, 6 ECN's, 3 vendors and even a few funds that provide a decent amount of FX liquidity. So that gives us well more than 21 'foreign exchanges' and the trouble is - they aren't in one place, not even in one continent, and that's before we start to talk about regional pairs or time zone gaps.

The other thought was one of the relative difficulty of bringing equities technology into an OTC market like FX let alone the idea of bringing in new telecommunications technology.

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