i just typed up a lengthy entry comparing today's cme currency rates for the majors (i've been monitoring them) with what can be found at a few of the fx shops out there - and then i lost it. damn. i won't do that again. but the gist of it was that the cme's eur/usd rates seems to be consistently tight - one or two pips - however, some of the other majors (esp the usd/chf) range pretty darn high from time to time. right now the usd/chf is at nine pips. i can get if for three pips at at least three different fx shops (two are swiss, realtimeforex and acm, which helps expalin it) anyway, from my admittedly brief empirical study, i'd say the cme is not necessarily better than the fx market although the eur/usd is certainly great at 1-2 pips. then again, oanda has it at two most of the time. in any case, i'm not trying to defend the spot market. but i do detect just a smidgen of futures bias here.