XAUUSD is the price of one troy ounce of gold quoted in US dollars. XAU is the metal's ticker and USD is the dollar, so the symbol tells you how many dollars one ounce of gold is worth. On MT5 it trades like any other symbol with bid, ask and spread.

What moves the gold price?

Gold is driven mainly by US dollar strength, real interest rates and bond yields, risk sentiment and safe-haven demand, inflation expectations, and central bank buying. A stronger dollar and higher real yields tend to pressure gold, while fear, falling yields and inflation worries tend to support it.

What are the best hours to trade gold?

Gold is most active during the London session and the US session overlap, roughly 08:00 to 17:00 London time. This is when liquidity is deepest and spreads are tightest. Major moves often happen around US economic releases such as CPI, jobs data and Federal Reserve decisions.

What is the best indicator for trading gold?

There is no single magic indicator. Because gold trends hard and reverses sharply, a structure-based reading that confirms whether the market is genuinely trending or chopping is more useful than a lone oscillator. Market Structure Pro fuses 27 tools into one TRADE, TRANSITION or NO TRADE verdict for XAUUSD.

Home / Learn Hub / How Markets Work / The Other Side of Your Trade

Intermediate

Who Is on the Other Side of My Trade? A-Book, B-Book and the Stop Hunt Myth

The honest answer has two halves that most people refuse to hold at the same time: yes, plenty of brokers genuinely take the other side of your trade and profit when you lose, and no, your broker almost certainly did not move the market to hit your stop.

In one sentence:

Every trade you place has a counterparty, and depending on your broker’s model that counterparty is either another participant in the wider market or your broker itself, which creates a real conflict of interest, but not the one most traders imagine.

Who Is on the Other Side of My Trade at a glance

A-book	Your order is hedged out to a liquidity provider. The broker earns spread and commission and is indifferent to your result
B-book	The broker takes the other side internally. Your loss is its gain and your profit is its cost
Hybrid	The overwhelmingly common model, clients are routed to one book or the other based on profile
Internalisation	Netting opposing client orders against each other so nothing needs hedging at all
The real conflict	A B-book broker has a financial interest in your losses. That is worth knowing and managing
The myth	That your position is large enough for anyone to move a market to reach your stop
Real misconduct	Exists, is documented, and has been fined and prosecuted, but looks nothing like a single stop hunt
Your best defence	Tier-one regulation, segregated funds, published execution statistics, and appropriate size

What it is and why it works

Every trade needs two sides. When you click buy, someone somewhere has agreed to sell. In a centralised market like futures that someone is another market participant matched by the exchange. In retail forex and CFDs, it is more complicated and considerably more interesting, and almost nobody explains it honestly to beginners.

Retail brokers operate on a spectrum between two models. In the A-book model, the broker passes the risk of your position on to a liquidity provider: a bank or non-bank market maker. It has no exposure to whether you win or lose; it earns the spread mark-up and commission and would happily see you profitable forever, because a profitable client keeps trading. In the B-book model, the broker does not hedge. It takes the other side of your position itself. If you lose, it keeps your loss. If you win, it pays you out of its own capital.

Almost every real broker runs a hybrid. Client flow is profiled and routed: consistently profitable clients, and clients trading size large enough to matter, tend to be hedged out to the market, while the flow that historically loses is kept internally. On top of that sits internalisation, which is entirely benign and enormously common, if one client is long two lots of EUR/USD and another is short two lots, the broker can simply net them against each other and carry no risk at all. A large book of retail clients naturally cancels itself out to a considerable degree, and only the residual needs hedging.

Here is the part that matters. A B-book broker profiting when you lose is a genuine conflict of interest, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you. It is a well-understood conflict, it is why regulators require risk warnings and impose leverage caps, and it is a legitimate reason to prefer a regulated broker with transparent execution. But a conflict of interest is not the same thing as manipulation, and the specific accusation most retail traders make, that the broker pushed the price to take out their stop, is almost never what happened. The reason is arithmetic, and we will come to it.

How to trade it, step by step

Find out what execution model your broker actually uses. Check the legal documents, not the marketing page. Terms such as “principal” or “we may act as counterparty” mean B-book capability; “agent” or “straight-through processing” points to A-book. Most disclose a hybrid. See ECN, STP and market maker brokers for how to read the language.
Check the regulator, then check the register directly. Look up the licence number on the regulator’s own website rather than trusting the logo on the broker’s footer. Tier-one regulation brings client money segregation, capital requirements, execution reporting and a complaints route that has teeth. Offshore registration brings a certificate.
Do the arithmetic on your own market impact before blaming anyone. Compare the notional value of your position against the daily turnover of the instrument you traded. On a major currency pair, a retail position is a rounding error inside a rounding error. If a number that small could move the price, the market would be trivially easy to manipulate by anyone with real capital.
Check whether the move happened everywhere. This is the decisive test and it takes thirty seconds. Open a chart from a second, unrelated broker or a public data source for the same instrument and time. If the wick that took your stop appears there too, the market moved: not your broker. If it appears only on your feed, you have something worth escalating.
Look at what was happening at that moment. Was it within minutes of a scheduled release? The daily rollover? A session close? A holiday? The overwhelming majority of “my stop got hunted” incidents land in one of those windows, where liquidity is genuinely thin and spreads genuinely widen for everyone at once.
Ask where your stop was sitting. Just beyond the round number, the session high, or the obvious swing point? Those are where the crowd puts stops, which makes them a pool of resting orders that the wider market has a real reason to trade into: no broker involvement required. Read liquidity sweeps and move your stop to where your idea is actually invalidated.
Keep evidence if something genuinely looks wrong. Screenshots with timestamps, the trade ticket, the requested and filled prices, and a comparison feed. A specific, documented complaint to a tier-one regulator is taken seriously. A vague accusation is not.
Reduce the conflict where you can. Choose a broker whose interests align better with yours, size positions so that thin-liquidity fills are survivable, and avoid trading through the windows where execution is worst. You cannot eliminate counterparty conflict in an OTC market, but you can stop volunteering for the worst of it.

Size every one of those entries with the position size calculator and check the trade is worth taking with the risk/reward calculator before you commit.

The conditions it needs

Understanding it changes broker selection

This is the practical payoff. Once you know that regulation, segregation of client funds and execution transparency are what limit the conflict, choosing a broker stops being about who advertises the tightest spread. A tight quote at a firm you cannot withdraw from is worthless.

It matters more as your size grows

A small account is largely irrelevant to any broker’s risk book. As your position sizes rise, execution quality, rejection behaviour and whether your flow is hedged start to have a measurable effect on your results, and the choice of venue becomes a real business decision.

It ends a whole category of wasted energy

Traders who believe the broker is the enemy stop improving, because every loss has an external explanation. Replacing that story with the actual mechanism (thin liquidity, clustered stops, ordinary volatility) puts the fixable causes back in view.

It is essential context for prop firm accounts

A prop firm evaluation is a simulated environment by design, and the firm’s commercial model is different again from a broker’s. Knowing how counterparty and payout incentives work helps you read the rules of any funded programme with clear eyes.

When it fails

“My broker moved the price to hit my stop.” Consider the scale. Global spot forex turnover runs into trillions of US dollars a day, and a single major pair accounts for a large share of that. Your position, even at generous leverage, is a vanishingly small fraction of one second of that flow. To move the visible market price against you, a broker would have to trade against the entire global market at enormous cost, to win the few hundred pounds sitting in your stop. Nobody does this. It would be the worst trade in the building.
“It only spiked on my chart, so it must be manipulation.” Sometimes a broker’s feed does show a wick others do not, and that is worth investigating, but the usual cause is that your broker aggregates a different, smaller set of liquidity providers. In a thin moment, one provider’s quote can print an outlier. Compare feeds before concluding anything, and note that price feeds legitimately differ in an over-the-counter market.
“A B-book broker is automatically a scam.” Internalising retail flow is a legal, disclosed, regulated business model, and netting client orders against each other is genuinely efficient. The conflict is real and worth managing; it is not by itself evidence of wrongdoing. Judge a broker on regulation, execution statistics, withdrawal record and disclosure: not on the existence of a dealing desk.
“An A-book broker has no conflict at all.” It has fewer, but it still profits from volume, which means it profits from you trading frequently and at size, whether or not that is good for you. Every intermediary’s incentives differ from yours somewhere. The question is always where, and how much it matters.
Confusing normal execution mechanics with misconduct. Slippage, requotes, widened spreads at news and asymmetric fills in fast markets are ordinary features of trading an OTC market in thin conditions. They feel personal because they happen at your worst moments, but your worst moments are, by definition, the market’s most stressed ones. See slippage and requotes.
Assuming misconduct never happens. It does, and pretending otherwise is as naive as the conspiracy theory. Regulators have fined and prosecuted firms for manipulating quoted prices, applying slippage asymmetrically so clients only ever got the worse side, delaying or rejecting profitable clients’ orders, and misusing client funds. Real misconduct is systematic, affects many clients over time, and shows up in patterns: not in one wick on one evening.

Where you will see this most clearly

EUR/USD: The clearest illustration of scale: the most traded market on earth, and utterly indifferent to any retail order.
GBP/JPY: Wide spreads and violent wicks make it the pair most often blamed on brokers when the cause is liquidity.
Gold (XAU/USD): Feed differences between brokers are most visible here, which fuels a lot of manipulation accusations.
Bitcoin: Genuinely fragmented pricing across venues, so different quotes at the same instant are entirely normal.

For different levels of experience

If you are brand new

When you buy, somebody sells. On a retail platform that somebody is usually one of two things: another participant in the wider market that your broker passed your order to, or your broker itself, keeping the other side of the trade on its own books.

The second one is legal, disclosed, and extremely common. It does mean the broker makes money when you lose, which is a genuine reason to care about who you trade with. Choose a broker regulated by a serious authority, one that keeps client money in segregated accounts, and one with a long record of paying withdrawals. That handles most of the risk.

What it does not mean is that your broker is watching your particular trade and pushing the price to take your stop. Your position is far too small to matter to anyone. Markets move because of enormous flows from banks, funds and corporations, and your stop being hit is a coincidence of where you placed it: usually right where everyone else placed theirs. That is a fixable mistake, and blaming the broker prevents you from fixing it.

If your results are inconsistent

If you have ever typed “broker stop hunt” into a search box after a loss, run the two-minute test instead. Pull up the same instrument and time on a completely different broker’s chart. In almost every case the same wick is there, because the market moved. That test has ended more of these arguments than any explanation.

Then ask a harder question: where was the stop? Just above the session high, a few points beyond a round number, or exactly under the obvious swing low? Those areas hold the crowd’s stops, and a cluster of stops is a genuine pool of liquidity. Larger participants who need to fill size have every reason to trade into it, because that is where the orders are. Nothing about that requires your broker’s involvement, and moving your stop to a level that genuinely invalidates your trade fixes it.

The part worth taking seriously is the conflict itself. If your broker is B-booking your flow, its risk desk profits from your losses. Manage that the way a professional would: use a tier-one regulated firm, keep only working capital on the platform, withdraw regularly, and read the execution and slippage policy in the client agreement rather than the homepage.

If you are experienced

The real structure is a risk-management decision, not a moral one. Brokers profile flow and route it to maximise risk-adjusted revenue: toxic or consistently profitable flow gets hedged, benign flow gets internalised, and the residual net exposure is hedged in aggregate rather than trade by trade. Internalisation is the efficient part; a large retail book is substantially self-netting, and hedging every ticket would simply pay away spread.

Where genuine problems live is in the details of execution policy: last look windows and their asymmetry, whether slippage is symmetric in both directions, rejection rates by client profitability, and latency handling around news. Those are measurable. Effective spread, fill rate and slippage distribution by direction across a large sample of your own trades will tell you far more about a venue than any disclosure document.

Prosecuted cases have generally involved exactly those levers applied systematically (asymmetric slippage, price feed manipulation, or dealing-desk intervention on profitable accounts) rather than anything resembling a targeted stop hunt. The correct posture is therefore evidential rather than either trusting or paranoid: measure your execution, compare venues, keep balances appropriate to counterparty risk, and treat regulatory jurisdiction as a first-order variable rather than a footnote. See broker comparison.

Risk management for this strategy

The risk this page is really about is counterparty risk, and it is the one risk position sizing cannot solve. If a broker fails, absconds or freezes withdrawals, your open position and your balance are exposed regardless of how well you traded. Tier-one regulation, segregated client funds and, where available, a compensation scheme are the only meaningful protections.

Practical measures follow from that. Keep on the trading platform only the capital your strategy needs to operate, and withdraw profits on a schedule rather than letting a balance accumulate. Split capital across more than one regulated broker once the account is large enough to justify it. And size positions so that the poor fills that occur in thin, fast conditions, which are normal and will happen, are survivable rather than account-defining. Use the position size calculator and assume a worse fill than you expect around news and at the weekend.

Where Market Structure Pro fits

The single most common reason a trader concludes their broker is hunting them is that they entered in conditions where poor fills and violent wicks were always likely, and had no way of seeing that at the time. A thin, news-adjacent, wide-spread market looks exactly like a good one on a candle chart.

Market Structure Pro is built to make those conditions visible before the entry rather than after the loss. It is session-aware and spread-aware, so the live state of the market is part of the verdict rather than something you have to remember to check, and its ranging and chop filter exists specifically to return NO TRADE when price is moving on thin, uncommitted flow.

You get a single TRADE, TRANSITION or NO TRADE verdict with a confidence percentage, an A/B/C grade and a plain-English explanation of what is supporting or limiting it, locked on the closed bar so it cannot repaint into a signal that was never there. That will not change your broker’s business model, nothing on your chart can, but it does keep you out of a large share of the trades that generate the accusation. MSP is decision support, not a signal service, and it guarantees nothing.

TRADETRANSITIONNO TRADE

One verdict with a confidence score, an A/B/C grade and a plain-English reason. Non-repainting, on every MT5 instrument and timeframe.

Stop guessing whether the setup is valid

Market Structure Pro reads structure, trend, momentum, levels, volatility, volume and session in one pass and gives you a single answer with the reasoning attached. Free 7-day trial, no card required.

Start free trial

Frequently asked questions

Does my broker trade against me?

It might, and legally so. Brokers running a B-book take the other side of client positions internally rather than hedging them, which means they profit when clients lose. Most retail brokers run a hybrid model, hedging some flow and internalising the rest. It is a disclosed and regulated practice, but it is a genuine conflict of interest worth understanding.

What is the difference between an A-book and a B-book broker?

An A-book broker passes your order's risk on to a liquidity provider and earns only spread and commission, so it is indifferent to whether you win. A B-book broker keeps the other side of your trade on its own books, so your loss is its revenue. In practice almost every broker runs both and routes clients between them.

Did my broker hunt my stop loss?

Almost certainly not. Your position is far too small to give anyone a reason to move a market against it, and the cost of doing so would vastly exceed the value of your stop. Check the same instrument on another broker's chart at the same timestamp; in nearly every case the same move is there, meaning the market moved and your stop was simply sitting where the crowd's stops were.

Why does price spike just past my stop and reverse?

Because stops cluster in obvious places such as round numbers and session highs and lows, and a cluster of stop orders is a pool of liquidity. Larger participants who need to fill size are naturally drawn to where the orders are, and the triggered stops themselves add fuel to the move before it reverses. This is ordinary market mechanics, not broker interference.

Is a market maker broker bad?

Not inherently. Market making is a legitimate business and internalising offsetting client orders is efficient. What matters is regulation, whether client funds are segregated, execution quality and the firm's record on withdrawals. A well-regulated market maker can be a better counterparty than a poorly regulated firm claiming pure straight-through processing.

Do brokers really manipulate prices?

Genuine misconduct exists and has been fined and prosecuted, typically involving systematic behaviour such as manipulated price feeds, slippage applied only in the client's disfavour, or dealing-desk intervention against profitable accounts. That looks very different from a single unfavourable wick. Real misconduct affects many clients over time and shows up as a pattern in the data.

How can I tell if a price spike was real?

Compare the same instrument and timestamp on an unrelated broker's platform or a public data source. If the move appears on both, the market moved. If it appears only on your feed, note the exact time, requested price and filled price, take screenshots, and raise it with the broker and, if unresolved, the regulator.

How do forex brokers make money?

Through the spread mark-up, commissions, overnight swap charges and, for the portion of flow they do not hedge, the net trading result of their client book. Some also earn from currency conversion and inactivity fees. The mix varies by firm, which is exactly why the execution model matters when choosing one.

Should I use a bigger or more regulated broker?

Regulation matters more than size. A firm licensed by a tier-one authority is required to segregate client money, hold capital, report execution quality and submit to a complaints process with real consequences. That reduces counterparty risk far more effectively than a familiar brand name or a tight advertised spread.