EXCLUSIVE: Scope Prime's Andrew Taylor On Pricing Sharp Gold Flow At The Asian Open

Gold, sharp flow and the Asian open: What to ask your prime of prime before you commit

Andrew Taylor is Managing Director, APAC, at Scope Prime @ScopePrime , the institutional liquidity arm of Rostro Group. He has spent more than 30 years in FX and CFD markets, across bank dealing desks, retail brokers and prime-of-prime businesses.

Andrew Taylor, Managing Director, APAC, Scope Prime

For many brokers serving Asian clients, gold is no longer one instrument among several major ones that retail traders just love to speculate on. One major tier-1 brokerage which publishes its instrument split, reported gold at 42.4% of platform volume in the second quarter of this year and 59% in January. Industry consensus is widely universal: metals continue to dominate trading flows, and retail brokers in the industry experience a persistent challenge in shifting client interest away from gold.

It is also where weak pricing has been exposed most brutally. Gold fell as much as 6.3% intraday on 21 October 2025, its biggest intraday drop since 2013. It then hit a record intraday high near US$5,600 an ounce in the last week of January and, on 30 January, dropped more than 12% intraday – its steepest intraday decline since the early 1980s. The World Gold Council (WGC) calculates that realised volatility earlier this year reached the top 5% of readings since 1971.

One of the big issues for a broker is no longer whether its gold book contains sharp flow – it almost certainly does. The question is whether you know where it sits, what it costs you and whether your liquidity relationship is built to price it – or to punish your whole book for it.

Why gold in Asia is harder

When the WGC examined gold's bid-ask spreads through the turbulence of early 2026, it found that the four largest spikes all came on the early Asian market opening on Monday, or early on Thursday into Friday, as prices gapped into the Asian open on thin liquidity. COMEX gold's daily break and weekly reopen also fall at the start of the Asian day. A stale quote survives longer in a thin market, and in Asia it is your clients who are at their screens to hit it.

Then there’s the matter of different exchanges. London spot, COMEX futures and Shanghai normally move together, but in 2025 they diverged. In August, the premium of COMEX futures over London spot reached a record – beyond US$100 an ounce at one point. Granted, it happened right after a US customs ruling suggested that 1 kg and 100 oz bars would face tariffs. Nevertheless, a quote built from one reference is exposed to anyone trading off another. Retail pricing drifted from reality too: we were observing brokers quoting gold inside US$0.10 during the late-2025 rally, when the institutional market was nearer US$0.30.

As much of Southeast Asia's retail business runs through introducing brokers (IBs), a strategy distributed through an IB network, a signals channel or a copy-trading leader can be replicated across hundreds of accounts at once. Screened account by account, it looks like many small, forgivable edges. But your liquidity providers, who see the aggregate, see one large one. As one senior industry leader said late last year, price-makers can spot clusters of gold EA traders that a broker watching only headline markouts will miss.

How the bill reaches you

Route sharp gold flow into an aggregated pool and it will fill, disproportionately, against whichever provider is slowest to update – that is what "best price" means in a fast market. Each provider measures its own markout and responds the way liquidity providers respond: wider spreads, smaller size, more rejections. That response is applied to the relationship, not to the handful of accounts that caused it. Months later, your soft flow is paying for a problem it did not create.

A hybrid book sharpens the effect. If you internalise the soft flow and pass on the rest, your provider sees only the sharp residue and prices you on it.

Warehousing is an alternative, but it only works with the balance sheet to match. After the early-2026 dislocations, companies across the industry reported a clear rise in risk being passed on by brokers, particularly smaller ones that could no longer absorb large hits.

Measure first, then fix what is yours

Brokers that handle sharp flow well start by measuring it, and at a finer resolution than most. A one-second markout and a 60-second markout can tell different stories about the same trade. The useful view takes several horizons against a declared benchmark, then cuts the results by session, by instrument and by IB or strategy cluster rather than by account alone.

Once flow is measured, it can be priced – and pricing it is usually better business than ejecting the client. The mechanism is segmentation: persistent sharp flow goes to a feed priced for it, while the rest of the book stays on pricing that reflects its own quality. Soft flow stops subsidising the minority, and the sharp client stays on the platform.

Segmentation does not make the cost disappear, it will still land somewhere: in the client's spread, the IB's rebate or the broker's own margin. What changes is that the cost becomes visible and attributable. The same rigour belongs in the controls a broker applies to its own clients. Where used, price tolerance and last-look-style checks should be symmetrical, disclosed and brief – the standard any broker should expect of its own providers.

A decision to reprice or reroute a client deserves a documented methodology, a review path, a client communication process and a record that could be shown to a regulator. Weekend and holiday exposure belongs in the same framework, as scheduled risk rather than bad luck. That means Friday-night reviews of exposure and funding, plus a written plan for every Shanghai closure.

What to ask before you commit

Having worked on both sides of the relationship, at retail brokers and at prime-of-prime providers, I would want several questions answered in writing before routing my flows. The most revealing is also the simplest: what did clients like you receive on 21 October 2025 and 30 January 2026? Spreads, fills, rejects and margin calls on those two days are the honest test of a provider.

Asking how the provider will measure your flow – at which markout horizons, against which benchmark, across clusters as well as accounts – and whether it will share the figures it uses internally to price you comes next. What happens to the rest of your pricing if part of your flow turns sharp? The answer to look for is segmentation rather than a relationship-wide reprice, backed by written criteria for moving flow between feeds, notice periods and a review you can challenge.

Depth and distance matter as much as price. And instead of marketing claims – focus on an odd hour, like asking how much gold you can execute at the quoted price at 06:00 in Hong Kong. The answer should give top-of-book size in ounces and lots, say whether depth is full-amount or sweepable and show your effective spread for a typical ticket by session, including rollover and the Monday open.

Credit, margin and Asian gold trading

The January sell-off showed how quickly margin can move. While gold may not be the next market that demands it, this January’s volatility demonstrated that providers can change margin requirements intraday, without much notice and shareable margin across feeds is an important pointer to have. Look for documented triggers and a single margin pool across feeds, so that segmentation does not trap capital.

Sharp flow is not going to leave Asian gold – if anything, the region's traders will keep getting faster. The brokers that come through the next dislocation intact will not be the ones that ejected the most clients. They will be the ones that knew where their sharp flow sat, fixed what was theirs to fix, priced the rest where it sat, and ultimately chose a provider that told them, in writing and before they signed, how it would treat them on the worst day of the year.

Scope Prime fully rolled out its 24/7 gold and silver products earlier this year and has since extended continuous trading to 24/7 oil liquidity in Brent and WTI CFDs.

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