Dealing Desk / No Dealing Desk (NDD)

A dealing desk broker takes the other side of a client's trade internally rather than passing it to the market, giving the broker a direct interest in the client's losses (and a conflict of interest that regulators require to be managed and disclosed). A No Dealing Desk (NDD) broker instead routes every order out to external liquidity, removing that structural conflict. Most STP and ECN brokers market themselves as NDD, which is a legitimate and common model, but the label alone doesn't guarantee execution quality — checking a broker's regulation and actual order-routing disclosures matters more than the acronym.