Advanced & Pro Clients

These terms can cause a lot of confusion, but in terms of TabTrade we are all of these types of broker, as these terms all describe how we handle different aspects of facilitating your trading. However, some of these terms can be misunderstood so it is best to clarify them

ECN

This refers to an Electronic Communication Network and describes a pricing and execution model for financial markets. An ECN lets price makers or market makers (e.g. banks) stream prices to traders using the ECN, letting those traders execute on the pricing. An ECN will often have those different price makers competing against each other to provide the best pricing to ensure they fill trader orders.
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TabTrade uses ECN pricing on our instruments such as FX and metals, letting us provide you institutional level ECN pricing to trade on. We also enable electronic crossing within our own ecosystem, allowing us to match trades internally rather than needing to pass through every trade to an external liquidity provider or ECN. We believe this ECN model provides the best execution environment for our traders, and lets us offer ultra-fast execution.

STP

This term refers to Straight-Through Processing, and refers to a broker executing orders automatically without dealer intervention. A broker will stream pricing to you and then execute your order on those prices based on automated matching rules to various liquidity providers or other customers, depending on the model used.

NDD

This is another term to describe parts of the execution model of a broker. It means No Dealing Desk. An NDD broker is one that does not have an active dealing desk present (e.g. a team intercepting orders and deciding manually whether to fill them, requote or reject).
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TabTrade is an NDD broker, as we do not maintain a dealing desk - all trades are executed using the STP model of automated execution.

Market Makers

Most CFD issuing brokers are considered market makers, because when you trade CFDs with them you usually trade an over-the-counter (OTC) product made by that broker, with the broker and yourself both acting as principals in that contract with each other. The broker makes a market in their own CFDs for you to trade on, and is therefore a market maker.
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How the broker manages their risk, such as deciding how they will hedge the risk of making that market is separate to the ‘market maker’ classification, because a broker’s hedging with their liquidity providers is a trade between those parties.

This terminology is sometimes used to refer to a CFD broker who makes their own price feed rather than passing on pricing from an underlying liquidity provider. TabTrade does not do this, we pass on pricing from our liquidity providers directly to you, only adding our fees and spreads or filtering bad pricing.

TabTrade’s Model

Based on the above definitions, we consider ourselves to be an ECN/STP/NDD broker - we offer ECN pricing and crossing internally, as well as executing trades using an STP model with no dealing desk (NDD).

We do not currently offer professional accounts, as we provide professional trading conditions to all customers equally.
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What we do provide is a VIP account for active or high volume traders who need even more competitive conditions and customization. If you believe you meet the requirements for a VIP account, please reach out to us to discuss options.