Reference
Brokerage Technology Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms this industry uses without explaining. Each entry links through to deeper material where there is more worth knowing.
AMLAnti-Money Laundering
AML refers to the controls a financial business maintains to detect and prevent money laundering, including client due diligence, transaction monitoring and reporting.
Bridge
A bridge is the component that connects a trading platform to external liquidity, routing orders and streaming prices between them.
Commission
In a brokerage context, commission most often refers to the amount a partner earns on the trading activity of clients they introduced, or a fee charged per trade.
Copy Trading
Copy trading is a model in which one account's trades are automatically replicated onto follower accounts, scaled proportionally to each follower's allocation.
CRMCustomer Relationship Management
In a brokerage context, a CRM is the back-office system that manages client records, KYC and onboarding, trading account provisioning, deposits and withdrawals, and partner commission calculation.
cTrader
cTrader is a retail trading platform developed by Spotware, known for its interface and its use of C# for automated trading strategies.
Equity
Equity is an account's balance adjusted for the unrealised profit or loss on its open positions.
High-Water Mark
A high-water mark is the previous peak value of a managed fund, used to ensure performance fees are charged only on new profit above that peak.
IBIntroducing Broker
An introducing broker is a partner who refers clients to a brokerage and earns commission on those clients' trading activity.
KYCKnow Your Customer
KYC is the process of verifying a client's identity and, usually, their address, before allowing them to transact.
Leverage
Leverage is the ratio between the position size a client can control and the margin required to hold it.
Liquidity ProviderLP
A liquidity provider supplies the prices and execution capacity that a broker offers to its clients.
MAMMulti-Account Manager
MAM is a managed-account structure in which a manager places a single trade that is allocated across many investor accounts, each of which keeps its own balance and statement.
Margin
Margin is the capital required to open and maintain a leveraged position.
MT5MetaTrader 5
MetaTrader 5 is a multi-asset trading platform developed by MetaQuotes, widely used by retail brokers for execution, charting and order management.
MT5 Manager
MT5 Manager is the broker-side administrative layer of a MetaTrader 5 environment, used to create and configure trading accounts, manage groups and trading conditions, apply balance operations and inspect trading activity.
PAMMPercentage Allocation Management Module
PAMM is a managed-account structure in which investor capital is pooled into a single fund and each investor holds a percentage share, with profits and losses allocated by that share.
Prop FirmProprietary Trading Firm
A proprietary trading firm allocates capital to traders, commonly after an evaluation challenge, and shares the resulting profits with them.
Spread
The spread is the difference between the bid and ask price of an instrument, and is a primary source of broker revenue.
Trading Group
A trading group is a configuration object on a trading platform that defines spreads, commissions, leverage, permitted symbols and trading permissions for a set of accounts.
WebTrader
A WebTrader is a browser-based trading terminal that lets clients trade without installing desktop software.
White Label
A white label is an arrangement in which a business operates a product under its own brand while the underlying technology or infrastructure is provided and operated by another party.
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