Market participants can be categorized into five groups including international banks, their customers, nonbank dealers, FX brokers, and central banks.
About 100-200 banks worldwide stand ready to make a market in foreign exchange. The interbank market accounts for 86% FX market in 2010.
Nonbank dealers, including investment banks, mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds account for about 47% of the interbank trading volume in 2010.
The structure of the FX market is one of the primary functions of a commercial banker: to assist clients in the conduct of international commerce. (*)
The spot and forward FX markets are OTC. It is a worldwide linkage of currency trading banks,
nonbank dealers, and FX brokers, who assist in trade, connected to one another vie a network of telephone, computer terminals, and automated dealing systems. Reuters (路透社) and EBS (电子经纪服务公司) are the largest vendors of quoting screen monitors used in trading currencies.