Here's what most of us won't say out loud.
1. If your flow turns toxic, you often won't get a call. You'll get moved to a worse feed. You widen spreads for everyone, and your good clients leave. The fix is to split clean and hard flow into separate accounts, so a few strategies don't set the price for everyone.
2. Your terms are only as good as the hedge capacity behind them. When most brokers' clients are long gold at the same time, that capacity is shared. In a fast move, limits and margins can change mid-event.
3. Your NOP limits were probably set when FX was most of your book. Now gold and oil carry more of your risk, and the limits haven't moved. They rarely get revisited unless you ask.
4. A spike in volume isn't always good news. When Brent jumped in March, one broker reported oil trade counts up more than 10x in a month. A lot of flow that arrives in a spike is flow you'd rather not have.
5. Your "retail" book is less retail than you think. Algorithms now run about a third of all FX trading, and some of it sits in your book as EAs. Your LP sees it in the markouts long before you see it in your P&L.
None of this makes an LP bad. It just isn't on the rate card.
