Brokerage technology, defined plainly

A liquidity provider that holds prime brokerage relationships with large banks and resells that access to smaller brokers, who could not meet the banks' credit and volume requirements directly.

Combining quotes from several liquidity sources into one order book, so a broker can price and fill against the best available depth instead of a single provider's stream.

A bank, market maker or non-bank firm that streams executable prices to brokers and takes the other side of their trades, earning from the spread and the flow it receives.

Rules that decide which venue receives each order, based on price, venue preference, weighted distribution or current exposure, with failover when a venue rejects or disconnects.

A short window in which a liquidity provider can check a trade request against its current price before accepting or rejecting it. Long or asymmetric last look is a common source of rejections.

The difference between the price a trader requested and the price at which the order was actually filled. It can be negative or positive and is a core measure of execution quality.

How the market moved in the seconds after a fill, measured from the liquidity provider's side. Consistently negative markout on a taker suggests the flow is informed or toxic for that provider.

Financial Information eXchange, the standard messaging protocol for sending prices, orders and fills between trading systems. Most institutional liquidity and many broker platforms connect over FIX sessions.

Software that connects a retail trading platform to external liquidity, translating its orders into venue messages and routing fills back, often with aggregation and markup applied in between.

A tradeable price built from two or more underlying legs, such as a currency cross derived from two pairs quoted against a common currency, and hedged through those legs.

A forward contract on a restricted currency that is settled in cash, usually in US dollars, against a published fixing rate instead of by delivering the currency itself.

Futures contracts with no expiry date, mostly on digital assets. A periodic funding payment between longs and shorts keeps the contract price close to the underlying spot price.

The periodic payment exchanged between long and short holders of a perpetual futures contract. When the contract trades above spot, longs usually pay shorts, and the reverse when it trades below.

The time taken for a price or an order to travel between systems. Lower and more consistent latency reduces slippage and rejections, which is why trading servers are often hosted close to liquidity.

The core of a trading platform that pairs buy and sell orders according to set rules, usually price-time priority, and produces the fills every other system records.

The matching rule in which the best price is filled first and, at the same price, the order that arrived earliest is filled first.

Widening the upstream bid and offer before showing them to clients, set per instrument or client group. It is one of the main ways a broker earns on each trade.

The charge or credit applied to a leveraged position held past the daily rollover time, reflecting the interest rate difference between the two sides of the position.

An account type on which overnight swaps are not charged, often offered for religious reasons, usually with an alternative fee structure configured by the broker.

The definition of an instrument: contract size, tick size and value, precision, margin currency, trading hours and limits, read by every part of the platform.

A set of accounts that share configuration such as available instruments, leverage, fees and permissions, so a broker can offer different terms to different segments without separate platforms.

A product built and operated by one company and sold under another company's brand, so the reseller offers it to clients as its own without building it.

A complete brokerage setup delivered ready to operate, typically combining trading platform, liquidity, CRM, payments and risk controls configured for the broker's licence.

A service in which investors automatically mirror the trades of a chosen strategy provider in their own accounts, in proportion to their balance, and can stop following at any time.

A pooled arrangement in which investors fund one account that a manager trades. Profit and loss are shared according to each investor's percentage of the pool.

A setup in which a manager places one block order that is allocated across separate client accounts by a set method, while each account stays in the client's own name.

The highest value an investor's account has reached. Performance fees are only charged on gains above it, so a manager is not paid twice for recovering earlier losses.

A trader whose positions others copy or invest in, typically paid through performance, management or volume fees agreed with the broker.