Signaling a dramatic shift in how foreign exchange market participants gain visibility into inter-bank foreign exchange rates, obtain market data, Integral Development Corporation today announced the launch of TrueFX.
TrueFX provides retail brokers with direct access to the interbank foreign exchange market. By increasing transparency and auditability for everyone, Integral predicts that a safer more trustworthy market will emerge, resulting in dramatically greater market participation. Built upon FX Grid, Integral's global inter-institutional connectivity and trading network, linking market making banks to FX market participants, TrueFX is live and in production today. On the portal site TrueFX.com, Integral publishes tick-by-tick historical and real-time market data free of charge to all market participants. Users have access to clean, aggregated, dealable bid and offer prices direct from leading market makers.
"TrueFX is a paradigm shifting event that will change the way foreign exchange markets are organized," said Harpal Sandhu, CEO, Integral Development Corporation. "By providing clean, dealable prices supported by free real time and historical tick-by-tick data, we believe the overall confidence in the market will increase, which in turn will lead to much greater market participation."
"The FX market has developed into a loosely integrated set of decentralized markets," said Larry Tabb, Founder and CEO, Tabb Group. "For the FX market to reach its true potential, we will need to lower entry barriers, reduce cost, eliminate friction, increase transparency, and most importantly increase the safety for retail traders. This will open the FX market to a wider array of participants and expand the market dramatically."
Features of TrueFX include facilitating a "No Dealing Desk" operation, back-to-back cover trading, integration with prime brokers, a netting facility for high-volume small-size tickets, and customer account segregation capabilities. Among the brokers that are using Integral's setup today and supporting the TrueFX initiative are ODL Securities, PFGBest and Rosenthal Collins Group LLC.
Open access to tick-by-tick real-time rates are available via GUI and API for all the major currency pairs: USD/EUR, USD/JPY, GBP/USD, EUR/GBP, USD/CHF, EUR/JPY, EUR/CHF, USD/CAD, AUD/USD and GBP/JPY. Thirty-two currency pairs and other functionality including currency tools and web widgets, for sharing and customizing, are available for download. Users also have access to free demo accounts for FX Power Trader, allowing them to view rates, practice trading and build customized trading strategies.
Integral said it is working on making historic tick-by-tick bid-offer data available, eventually going back to early 2008. While data is initially presented for download only, the system will allow for specific queries at a later time. "Access to clean historical data is especially appealing to algorithmic trading venues as they are looking for ways to test and refine their trading strategies." added Sandhu. "Once the query-based search is implemented, anyone will be able to spot check individual trades they executed, and compare the rate they got from their institution to that of the multi-source liquidity feed."
Integral, as a neutral technology provider, has a history of using its technology to help market participants build their businesses, reach their goals and provide the most sophisticated trading environment to their users. The firm has a history of pushing the envelope in foreign exchange technology. Among other things, Integral built the first multi-sided trading network and offers all its products as on demand services. In that spirit, the decision was taken to create TrueFX.