Forex price feed: how brokers get the bid and ask prices clients see

What is a forex price feed?

A forex price feed is a continuous stream of bid and ask quotes for each instrument, sent by a liquidity provider or a market-data vendor to a broker’s trading server. Each update is a tick: a symbol, a bid, an ask, sometimes the available size, and a timestamp. A busy pair can produce many ticks per second during London and New York hours and far fewer in the quiet hour after the US close.

For a broker there are two kinds of feed. An executable feed comes from a provider that will fill orders at, or close to, the prices it streams; that is what you hedge against. An indicative feed is reference data from a vendor, useful for charts, sanity checks and instruments you price yourself, but nobody is promising to trade on it. Mixing the two up is one of the classic causes of trouble.

Where do forex bid and ask prices come from?

Bid and ask prices come from the institutions that are willing to trade: large banks, non-bank market makers, and electronic venues where they meet. Retail brokers rarely connect to the top tier directly; most connect through a prime-of-prime provider or a non-bank market maker that aggregates that liquidity and extends credit to smaller firms.

The scale behind those quotes is large. The Bank for International Settlements’ 2025 Triennial Survey found that global FX trading in April 2025 was up 28% from 2022, in a market whose daily turnover runs into trillions of dollars, with sales desks in the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore and Hong Kong accounting for most of it. That depth is why major pairs can be quoted with very tight spreads, and why exotic pairs, with far less of it, cannot.

Your provider’s position in this chain decides what you receive. A provider that makes its own prices and holds the risk streams firm quotes; one that passes your orders further along may apply last look or reject orders when the market moves. Ask which it is. The liquidity provider glossary entry explains the types of provider.

How does a provider’s stream become an MT5 symbol?

The raw stream goes through five stages before a client sees it. Each stage is configured by someone, and each can go wrong.

1. ConnectionThe provider streams prices over a FIX session or a native connection into a gateway, a bridge or Ultency.
2. MappingThe provider’s instrument is matched to your MT5 symbol: name, digits, contract size and trading sessions.
3. Aggregation and filteringIf several providers stream the same instrument, their quotes are combined and outliers are rejected.
4. MarkupMT5 applies the spread and markup settings for the symbol and the client’s group.
5. DistributionThe final quote goes to desktop terminals, the web platform, mobile apps and your own front ends, and is stored as tick and chart history.

How does price aggregation work?

Aggregation takes quotes for the same instrument from several providers and builds one price, usually by taking the best bid and the best ask available at that moment. With three providers quoting EUR/USD, your aggregated bid might come from one and your ask from another, producing a tighter spread than either alone.

That only works if bad prices are kept out. A provider that sends a stale or erroneous quote can, for a moment, become your “best” price and trigger client stop-losses at a level the market never traded. Aggregators therefore compare each provider against the others and against recent history before accepting a quote. MetaQuotes says Ultency checks every incoming price against other providers, and lets brokers choose per instrument which providers contribute to the book.

Who adds the markup, and how is it set?

The broker adds the markup, in its own MT5 configuration. MetaQuotes lists spreads, markups and commissions among the trading conditions a broker controls, and they can be set per symbol and per client group. A broker can therefore offer a raw-spread account with a commission and a standard account with a wider spread and no commission, both built from the same feed.

The economics depend on three things: the markup or commission you charge, what your provider charges you on the hedged volume, and how much of your flow you hedge at all. A fraction of a pip of markup on a standard lot and a round-turn commission on a raw-spread account can earn a similar amount per lot; which works better depends on who your clients are and how often they trade. The table puts the two models side by side.

There is no “typical” markup we would quote on a web page, because it moves with the provider’s own pricing, the instruments and the competition in your target market. What we can do is model it for your case. Message us on WhatsApp with your target clients and instruments and we will send current figures and a worked example for your set-up.

What role do data vendors and custom feeds play?

Data vendors fill the gaps executable providers leave. You may need a reference feed for an index CFD whose provider streams only during cash hours, a crypto feed built from several exchanges, or a second source to check your main provider against. On MetaTrader 5 those feeds come in through the same door as liquidity: MetaQuotes defines the Gateway API as the way to create custom data feeds as well as to connect trading systems.

The rule is to know which feed each symbol is priced from and whether you can hedge at that price. A symbol priced from an indicative feed and kept on your own book is a B-book product by construction; make sure your risk team and your execution policy say so. Our MT5 Gateway API guide covers the connector side.

What is last look, and how does it affect the feed?

Last look gives the provider a final chance to accept or reject your order at the price it quoted. With last look, the feed you see is a little less firm than it looks: in fast markets some orders will be rejected or filled at a different price, and your clients will feel it as slippage or requotes.

Last look is not banned, but the FX Global Code — the industry’s principles for the wholesale FX market — asks providers to be open about it. Ask any provider for its last-look disclosure, the hold time it applies and its rejection statistics for your flow, and compare them across providers before you choose.

How do you check the quality of a price feed?

Measure it rather than trusting the term sheet. Run the provider’s test feed alongside your current one for at least a week that includes a major data release, and compare these points:

Does server location affect the price feed?

Yes. Every millisecond between your provider and your trade server is a millisecond in which the market can move before your quote updates, and before your hedge order arrives. For FX that usually means hosting in or near the data centres where the main providers are, which for most of them is London; for US equities it is the New York area.

MetaQuotes makes the same point for Ultency, giving the example of a London server for forex providers and a New York server for NYSE providers. The client side matters less: a trader in Dubai or Jakarta will see a quote a fraction of a second later than a trader in London, but the price was made, and the hedge sent, in the data centre. Where the rest of your systems sit is covered in our forex broker technology stack overview.

A stale feed is worse than a slow one. If your server loses the provider connection and keeps showing the last price, clients can trade on a quote that no longer exists. Make sure symbols stop quoting, or switch to a backup provider, when the main feed goes quiet.

How does the feed reach the trader’s screen?

Once MT5 has the final quote, each client application receives it in its own way. The desktop terminal and MetaQuotes’ own apps connect to the server directly. Custom front ends, like our branded WebTrader and mobile trading app, read prices through the MetaTrader 5 Web API and pass them on.

Our Go back end asks MT5 for the latest ticks in batches every 100 milliseconds and pushes each client only the symbols it is watching, skipping anything that has not changed. Chart history comes from a cache, so scrolling back does not load the server. The Web API delivers bid and ask, not the providers’ order book, so our front ends show quotes rather than market depth. You can see the result in the WebTrader demo; the MetaTrader 5 Web API guide explains the interface.

How do price feeds work in grey label and white label set-ups?

In a grey label you normally use the provider’s feed. An MT5 grey label is a brokerage set up inside another company’s licensed MetaTrader 5 server: you get your own client groups and your brand on the WebTrader, mobile apps, CRM and client portal, while the MT5 server licence stays with the provider. Your groups can usually still have their own spread markups and commissions, which is how two grey label brands on one server can show different prices from the same feed.

With more control over the server — a white label, where available, or your own licence — you choose providers and build the feed yourself. Before you sign a grey label, ask which providers price your symbols, whether your groups can have different markups, and whether you will receive execution reports. If you want a second opinion on those answers, send them to us on WhatsApp.

What are the common price feed mistakes?

Most feed problems are configuration problems. These are the ones we see most often:

• Pricing a symbol from an indicative feed while assuming it can be hedged.
• Copying trading sessions from a template so the symbol trades while the provider is closed.
• No outlier filter, so one bad tick triggers a wave of client stop-outs and disputes.
• Markups applied to the wrong group after a configuration change, noticed only when clients compare prices.
• Contract sizes or digits that differ between provider and MT5.
• Nobody watching the feed at the Sunday open, when gaps and wide spreads are normal.

What drives the cost of a price feed for a broker?

The cost of a feed depends less on the feed itself than on the relationship around it. An executable feed is usually bundled with the provider’s trading terms, so you pay through commissions on hedged volume, minimum volume commitments or margin requirements rather than a separate data bill. Indicative feeds from vendors are normally priced per instrument set, per exchange licence and per number of users or servers.

When you compare offers, line them up item by item rather than by the headline. These are the points that change the real cost:

• Whether the feed is executable, indicative or both, and for which symbols.
• Commission basis on hedged volume, and whether it changes with monthly volume.
• Minimum monthly volume or minimum fee, and what happens if you fall short.
• Exchange or venue data fees passed through for index, stock or futures CFDs.
• Connection costs: FIX session, cross-connect in the data centre, bridge or gateway licence.
• Margin or collateral the provider requires before it extends credit.
• Notice period and exit terms if you move to another provider.

How does FXUP help with price feeds?

We help brokers choose and connect providers, configure symbols, sessions and markups on MT5, and test feeds side by side before going live. FXUP is a technology provider and not affiliated with MetaQuotes; we do not stream prices or act as a liquidity provider. For the commercial side see liquidity provider integration, and for how execution decisions follow the feed see A-book, B-book and hybrid execution.

If you are seeing spikes, gaps or complaints about prices, message us on WhatsApp with the symbol, the time and a screenshot; it is usually quicker to find the cause than it looks.

Questions buyers ask

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