How to Read Board Information, How to Interpret and Use It ~ Learn Board Reading to Aim for One Rank Higher Investor! | Episode 4: How to Know Order Status in FX [Taisei Ohira]

Profile of Yohei Onishi

Finance journalist. After working at a publishing company, he became independent in 1995 and has contributed articles focusing on finance and economy to money magazines, business magazines, and weeklies. He has conducted numerous interviews with frontline market analysts and strategists, as well as top executives of listed companies. He is well-versed in FX and financial trading in general.

*This article is a reprint and revised edition of FX Encyclopedia.com, April 2019 issue. Please note that the market information written in the main text may differ from current markets.

Order book information in FX and related data provision

In stock investment, it is essential to check order book information to gauge other traders’ expectations, and tools that cannot display it are hard to imagine. In FX, traders’ movements are of interest as well, but order book information is not generally available.

In stocks, trading centers such as the Tokyo Stock Exchange or the New York Stock Exchange handle the buying and selling. Therefore, it is not difficult to categorize and display the number of buy and sell orders by price band for that market.

By contrast, FX involves interbank trading (transactions between financial institutions) and, as with market-specific trading such as Click 365, also over-the-counter (OTC) trading on a global scale. It is almost impossible to provide information on order flow by price level for all such transactions.

That said, it is possible to publish information within the scope that can be grasped, and there are indeed cases where such information is provided. Some FX brokers operating in Japan publicly disclose order book information or data of a similar nature.

For example, Duquesne-Scippo Japan, a member of the Swiss banking group, displays bid and ask order quantities by price level under the name “order book” in the same way as stock trading. These reflect all orders from individual investors, financial institutions, and other ECNs (electronic communication networks) in the Swiss FX marketplace.