Dealing Desk
Market Structure & Participants
A dealing-desk broker internally handles client orders and may take the opposing side, acting as a market maker rather than routing to the interbank market.
What is a dealing desk?
A dealing desk (DD) is the internal team and system a broker uses to handle client orders in-house rather than passing them straight through to outside liquidity providers. Under this model the broker itself effectively acts as a market maker: it takes the opposite side of client trades, sets its own bid and ask prices, and may manage or hedge its net exposure across all clients rather than routing each individual order to the wider market.
Dealing-desk brokers are common in retail forex and CFDs, particularly on fixed-spread account types, since keeping order flow in-house allows a broker to guarantee a spread regardless of outside market conditions.
How a dealing desk operates
When a client places a trade, the dealing desk decides how to handle it — filling it internally against another client’s opposing order, absorbing it onto the broker’s own book, or hedging some of the net exposure externally. Because the broker is setting the price itself rather than pulling it live from an outside feed, a dealing desk can also issue a requote: offering a new price if the market has moved before the order was confirmed, since the broker isn’t simply accepting whatever the interbank market shows.
Dealing desk vs. no dealing desk
This sits in direct contrast to a No Dealing Desk (NDD) broker, which routes orders straight to external liquidity providers via ECN or STP technology, without an internal desk taking the other side. Neither approach is automatically better or worse — many well-regulated brokers run dealing-desk models responsibly — but the two create different incentive structures and execution experiences: a dealing desk can offer fixed spreads and no slippage in calm markets, while an NDD model generally offers variable, often tighter, market-reflective pricing with the trade-off of a separate commission.
Why it matters for traders
Knowing whether a broker runs a dealing desk helps explain the pricing and execution behavior you should expect — including the likelihood of requotes during fast markets, and why spreads may stay fixed rather than track live market conditions. It’s one of several factors worth checking in a broker’s account documentation or in FinPip’s broker reviews, alongside its regulation and typical spread data.