Traders are turning to electronic communication networks to gain access to the institutional foreign exchange market.
Continuum and CQG have announced the addition of foreign exchange trade execution to their services through integration with KCG Hotspot.

Hotspot integration allows for both foreign exchange market data delivery and low-latency order routing to the ECN using CQG’s infrastructure.

“Our KCG Hotspot integration is a powerful example of CQG’s ability to leverage Continuum APIs to make strategic additions to our product,” said Mike Glista, CQG’s director of order routing and vice president of Continuum. “Through this partnership, we’ve made an entire asset class available to our trading customers, while also contributing to the liquidity base of the Hotspot FX product itself – a clear win-win.”

Customers using CQG Integrated Client or CQG Trader, as well as those who have written to third party applications via CQG’s suite of API products are able to connect to Hotspot. The connection is powered by Continuum’s new Access Direct API family.

Continuum, a division of CQG, offers trade execution and data distribution for order execution and market data platforms, applications, and proprietary systems.

Continuum Connect, its flagship product, offers connections to over 70 FCM partners, over one hundred sources for market data and to more than forty exchanges for order routing.

KCG Hotspot offers access to more than sixty currency pairs with depth of book transparency and tight spreads of 1/10th pip. This latest partnership adds CQG’s traders to Hotspot’s diverse liquidity base of banks, institutions, hedge funds, high frequency traders, corporations, and CTAs.

“The foreign exchange market is large, liquid, and technologically-advanced,” said John Miesner, managing director and head of global sales at KCG Hotspot. “We’re pleased to partner with CQG, providing access to our robust market data, liquidity and existing client base, which consists of a diverse array of market participants.”

The Hotspot FX marketplace provides institutional clients with a real-time view of the spot FX market, including all bid/offer prices (not limited to best bid/offer only), the quantities available at each price level and the number of participants comprising the quantity at each price level.

As the marketplace evolved, Hotspot FX has added bank market makers, new price making functionality and flows of client-supplied liquidity from hedge funds, CTAs, asset managers, corporate treasuries, black box proprietary traders, and arbitrageurs, in order to make centralized price discovery more robust.

On July 1, 2013, Knight Capital Group and Getco Holding Company completed their merger to form KCG Holdings.