Exness Head of Trading Products Stanislav Bublik Talks Pricing, Stability, and More

How does Exness ensure proper quality of the trading experience for its traders?

Exness has 6 millions trades executed on average daily and over 350,000 active traders around the world, it is hard to name a silver bullet. We have to address the trading experience aspect holistically.

Firstly, we ensure proper geographical scale and round-the-clock monitoring of our trading infrastructure. Secondly, we provide fair and reliable pricing for every single tick and thirdly, we address common pain-points that traders may face in the trade execution area.

So what does this consistent and reliable service look like in action?

Let's take the common challenges many traders face:

Spread instability is very common over highly volatile periods, for example, high economic news. Naturally, brokers will try to keep your spreads as tight as possible, however that means quotes have to be updated extremely fast, which can cause slowness and freezes across the price distribution chain.

Another common challenge is the execution of stop orders and stop losses. By nature, those orders cause slippages that are painful for clients and may cause dissatisfaction. Brokers should also find ways to minimize slippages when possible.

Additionally, brokers must remember that fair position liquidation is extremely important in case an account faces margin call and consecutive stop out. Often market situations such as spread widening can trigger position liquidation, causing a lot of unease from clients.

So how do you find balance between tightness of spreads and performance?

We have alerts and monitoring at every step of the price-making and execution process in order to make sure that we are always staying informed about what is going on.

The simple omission of certain quotes is actually not a very good option because you would lose some important market data updates or even execute at a price that has never been sent to the client.

We have found a scientific way to keep our spreads tight and stable while still limiting the load.

There are complex calculations that are happening inside our trading engine, mathematically optimizing the feed we’re sending through the data infrastructure, keeping it at maximum efficient capacity while filtering the market noise that does not affect the execution quality.

All this is happening in high-performance trading engines that have the most processing capacity throughout the whole chain across our regions of presence.

The chart below shows our spreads on GBPUSD during non-farm payrolls, compared with some of our top competitors.

This is made possible thanks to the strong collaboration between different teams - support engineers, quantitative researchers, and developers.

In what ways do you ensure transparency and reliability of the trading experience?

As I said earlier, pricing is only one part of the puzzle. We execute on every tick we send to the client, meaning proper price transparency and the ability to reliably backtest your trading strategies.

More than that we aim to provide certain enhancements to the product which are similar to institutional markets, but for our retail clients. When executing stop orders we aim to fill the client at the requested price, despite moderate market gaps.

That means we effectively offset slippage for ~90+% of orders, making execution more predictable and stable.

Of course, there may be some cases of slippage despite this, but for the vast majority of clients we ensure low slippage and no stop-level experience, which is a rare combination.

Another problematic area is position liquidation in case an account faces a stop-out. We benchmark account stop-out thresholds from mid-price, ensuring price volatility protection for clients, except for rare cases of extremely leveraged positions where it is technically impossible.

Price volatility protection is covering individual accounts, delaying stop outs and protecting from liquidation in case of sudden spread widening, for example during rollover period.

To make sure clients see those mechanisms in action, we will soon add detailed information in the Personal Area, to provide even better visualization and transparency.