Spot FX vs currency futures
Spot FX is a decentralised market with no central limit order book and no consolidated tape, so any order flow built on it describes one venue. Currency futures listed on an exchange trade on a single central book with published executions and volume, which is what makes a footprint, a cumulative delta or a liquidity heatmap reproducible on them.
Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026
Two markets behind one word
When people say 'forex' they can mean two different things. Spot FX is the over-the-counter market where banks, ECNs and retail brokers each run their own pool of quotes and fills. There is no single venue where all euro-dollar trades meet, no common tick grid and no official volume figure for the market as a whole. What a retail platform shows as volume is often a count of quote updates, not currency traded.
Currency futures are exchange-listed contracts on a currency pair, such as the CME euro or yen contracts. They trade on one central limit order book, every execution is published by the exchange with its price and size, and the tape is the market's record rather than one participant's.
What that means for each tool
The mismatch between two spot FX feeds is not an error to debug; it is the normal state of a market without a consolidated tape.
| Tool | Spot FX (one broker feed) | Currency futures (exchange) |
|---|---|---|
| Footprint | Fills on that broker only, often tick-count volume | All executions on the contract, real size |
| Cumulative delta | Depends on the broker's classification and coverage | Ask volume minus bid volume from the exchange tape |
| Liquidity heatmap | That venue's displayed depth only | The central book's resting orders |
| Comparing two sources | Different venues, different records | Same record, differences come from settings |
In Senzoukria
The desktop application has no retail forex broker integration. Its own futures connections are Rithmic Direct, which the connection tour describes as connecting a futures account to ES, NQ and the other CME contracts, and Databento; crypto markets come from Binance and Bybit for analysis only. Traders who want currency order flow use CME currency futures on one of the futures connections, with the same footprint, heatmap and session tools as index futures. The 'Spot' and 'Perp' labels in the connection manager refer to Binance crypto markets, not to spot FX.
Market data on any of these sources is billed by the provider, and the account must be entitled to the exchange concerned.
Common mistakes
- Reading a broker's tick-count volume as traded currency.
- Expecting a footprint on two spot brokers to match.
- Calling a spot FX heatmap 'market liquidity' when it maps one venue's displayed orders.
- Ignoring the expiry cycle and contract size when moving from a spot pair to its futures equivalent.
Related
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Frequently asked questions
- Can I get real order flow on EUR/USD?
- Not market-wide on spot, because no consolidated tape exists. You can get exchange-published order flow on the CME euro futures contract, which trades the same currency relationship on one central book. Read the contract specification first so that the contract size, tick and hours are clear.
- Is a platform bridge from my forex broker a workaround?
- A bridge only forwards what the platform you already run is entitled to receive. From a spot FX broker that is still that broker's own record of fills and quotes, so the result remains venue-specific. It does not create a tape that the market itself does not publish.