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Who sits behind the quote

A broker's price is typically an aggregation of quotes from several liquidity providers. Banks, non-bank market makers, and electronic communication networks.

Each provider has its own character. Some quote tight but with small size. Some quote wider but hold up in stress. Some withdraw quickly when volatility rises.

The mix determines the quality of the broker's feed. During calm periods, tight providers dominate and spreads look excellent. During stress, those same providers step back, and what remains is the wider quotes.

Some brokers give information on their providers. Others treat it as a trade secret. Worth asking in any case.

Knowing the make-up helps explain behaviours that otherwise seem arbitrary, such as why spreads blow out at particular moments or why one broker handles a news event better than another.

Has anyone been able to find out which liquidity providers stand behind the quotes on the account, and did it explain anything?

A quote on a chart can be a second old, five seconds old, or older. On busy pairs it doesn't matter. On thin ones, or in a slow period, the displayed price may be stale compared with the real market.

Typical clues: the tick counter stops ticking, the spread looks suspiciously fixed, or the chart sits motionless while a related pair moves. Then the quote jumps, sometimes a whole pip, and the user has been trading against old information.

Fast traders and bots on the other side of the order can exploit this. They see the real price, send an order at the stale level, and take the difference. Brokers fight this with last look or latency filters, and those protections produce rejections for legitimate clients too.

For a scalper, the safeguard is awareness. If a pair seems frozen, don't treat it as calm. Check a correlated instrument, or a second data source, and compare.

Another sign is a sequence where ticks arrive in bursts after silence. The timestamp gaps reveal it.

When a quote goes stale on the pair being traded, what are the first signs on the platform?