Icebergs, Chameleons and Vipers: A Survey of FX Execution

The foreign exchange market has long been the most decentralized and opaque of all markets. As a result, FX traders labor under major informational disadvantages compared to their peers in other asset classes. Unlike equity markets, where SEC regulations mandate that public exchanges report transaction prices and daily trading volumes, FX boasts no such unified data sources. There are no central exchanges, pits or bulletin boards. Instead, FX transactions take place via a million phone calls, client visits, email threads and trading platforms. The entire market is over-the-counter, party to party, and nobody knows what anybody else is doing beyond...