Web Trader MT5
A direct price stream is a live, continuous feed of bid and offer prices provided directly by a liquidity provider or market maker to a client, without passing through a third-party aggregator or intermediary pricing layer.
In foreign exchange markets in particular, the quality of a price stream matters enormously. A direct stream tends to offer tighter spreads and faster updates because it reflects the liquidity provider’s actual positions and appetite in real time.
By contrast, a price that has been through an aggregator or re-priced by an intermediary may be slightly wider or slower to update. Banks and prime brokers typically offer direct price streams to institutional clients as part of a broader relationship, with the quality of the stream reflecting the size and importance of that client’s flow.
For high-frequency and algorithmic traders, even millisecond differences in price feed latency can meaningfully affect execution quality.
Example: A currency hedge fund receives a direct price stream from three of its relationship banks simultaneously. Rather than relying on a single source, its execution system compares the streams in real time and routes each order to whichever bank is showing the best price at that moment; a process that happens automatically and in fractions of a second.
