FX Spot+ is designed to provide a significant addition in addressable liquidity available to spot traders while also presenting a very powerful opportunity to distribute pricing to a large and diverse ecosystem of futures market participants. 

What is clear from the first year of trading is this: by making a few easily addressable, subtle adjustments to respect the unique futures-derived microstructure of the venue, your desk can optimize its interaction with this truly unique marketplace.

At its core, FX Spot+ is designed to remove friction and seamlessly connect the FX futures market with the OTC spot market. FX Spot+ allows OTC spot traders to directly interact with the liquidity and participants of the FX futures market, while still trading, booking and settling all of their activity as a spot transaction. 

The platform's foundation rests on several unique pillars:

• Truly firm liquidity: With a minimum price increment of 0.1 pip and with an order size ranging from $200,000 or $250,000 up to $25 million, depending on the currency pair.
• Anonymity: A fully anonymous, all-to-all market that is underpinned by a central spot credit counterparty.
• Access to the market’s view of futures liquidity and pricing: Implication technology allows a resting futures price to be displayed as a spot order, allowing OTC spot traders to see and directly interact with the futures liquidity - including any skews in that pricing coming from the large and diverse futures ecosystem.
• Distribution to the futures ecosystem: Not only can spot traders take futures liquidity in spot format, but resting FX Spot+ orders are also displayed natively to all other FX Spot+ participants and the entire CME Group FX futures ecosystem of over 1,100 institutions.
• The FX Link translation engine: FX Spot+ is underpinned by FX Link, which is a separate “hard match” orderbook for spot-starting FX swaps risk.

From a taking perspective, the true value of FX Spot+ is realized where our futures liquidity is structurally deepest. 

FX Spot+ allows that deep, robust liquidity from the futures market to be displayed as spot, contributing to price discovery and injecting additional liquidity across a range of currency pairs – very much including the commonwealth pairs (GBP, AUD, CAD and NZD). This dynamic is clearly reflected in current trading activity, with those commonwealth currencies now accounting for around 50% of total FX Spot+ volume.

^{Data supplied by CME Group as of June 13, 2026, showing the ADV for the 10 currency pairs currently live on FX Spot+.}

While FX Spot+ delivers a highly familiar spot workflow, it is fundamentally underpinned by futures market mechanics. One year in, we analyzed the execution strategies of two large financial institutions on the platform. The data reveals a stark contrast in performance based on how they adapted to the platform's unique microstructure.

• Bank A consistently ranked near the top by volume across every currency pair on FX Spot+. The firm secured a strong 79% average fill rate for orders from $500,000 to $15 million, with performance across the platform's eight most active pairs ranging from 65.1% to 84.5%.
• Bank B, by contrast, performed far below average. The firm achieved an average fill rate of just 17% on orders from $500,000 to $10 million. Performance varied significantly by currency, dropping to single digits and peaking at only 38.6% in its most active pairs. Consequently, Bank B generated some of the lowest trading volumes on the platform.

While FX Spot+ is built to be traded seamlessly as a spot venue, not all spot pools are the same. Every platform operates with its own unique microstructure – defined by distinct tick granularities, minimum order sizes, data speeds, liquidity dynamics and client ecosystems. 

Bank A achieved top-tier results by actively factoring in these venue-specific dynamics, while Bank B did not make requisite and additive adjustments reflective of the unique pool that is FX Spot+.

1. Optimize your tick size and slippage targets

While FX Spot+ supports granular 0.1 pip pricing, the underlying futures engine operates on a 0.5 pip minimum increment for most pairs (which effectively becomes 1.0 pip for inverted pairs like USD/JPY and USD/CAD due to spot translation conventions).

Adjustment: Configure your execution slippage to target at least 0.5 to 1.0 full pip. This minor adjustment allows your orders to easily fill into the next futures price level, drastically boosting your fill rates.

2. Handle "odd-lots" with zero-min FAKs

Because FX Spot+ translates futures contracts into OTC spot terms, inverted pairs can sometimes display fractional, odd-lot sizes in the order book.

Adjustment: When using Fill-and-Kill (FAK) orders, set your minimum execution quantity to zero. This allows your system to sweep up these fractional lots automatically, maximizing overall fill probability. (Note: FX Spot+ easily handles large size as well – we routinely see single fills exceeding $20 million).

3. Embrace futures market dynamics 

While the top-of-book depth in the futures market typically sits in the single-digit millions, its $97 billion ADV illustrates and evidences that liquidity refreshes with immense velocity. Analysis of the futures market showed that clips of $1 billion in EUR/USD can be filled in under 30 seconds, and FX Spot+ traders should be willing to interact with the liquidity in the same way – still placing large orders but allowing efficient execution through a series of rapid partial fills.

Adjustment: Be receptive to partial fills and allow resting orders to sit on the book.

To find out more and/or to analyze your existing activity on FX Spot+, please contact FXteam@cmegroup.com