FX liquidity

BidFX are connected to all the major tier-1 banks and FX liquidity providers (LP). LPs publish tradable FX price/quotes into the BidFX platform using the FIX protocol. The quotes from LPs are firm prices with an associated price-ID that needs to be attached to any order placed against the quote. The BidFX platform consumes billions for FIX messages per day. We provision high-bandwidth, cross-connect circuits in the main global data centres for this purpose. BidFX connect to banks where they host their price engines, in particular in:

• London (LD4),
• New York (NY4) and
• Tokyo (TY3).

Last look

FX quotes are short-lived and LPs reserve the right of last look. A quote usually is good for no more than a few hundred milliseconds. Network latency between the client application and the LP is therefore a significant consideration if we want to avoid order rejections.

If clients intend to trade directly against price-IDs, then it is recommended that they run their application very close to the source of liquidity and cross-connect within the same data centre. Alternatively, clients may route their orders to the BidFX Strategy Server which is located close to LPs to minimise both rejections and slippage.

Binary protocols

The BidFX Python API implements two binary protocols that are optimised to deliver realtime quotes from LPs directly to into a client’s application with minimal latency. The binary delivery mechanism is more efficient than the FIX protocol used by most banks to publish prices. Furthermore, using the publish and subscribe paradigm, BidFX servers publish only those quotes that are subscribed to, thus saving significantly in network traffic.