Slippage and Requotes Explained: Why Your Fill Is Not Your Price

Slippage is the gap between the price you asked for and the price you got. Some of it is unavoidable market physics, some of it is your own order choices, and a small part of it can genuinely be your broker, but only measurement tells you which.

Slippage and Requotes at a glance

What it is and why it works

Prices in a leveraged market are not a single number. At any moment there is a queue of bids and offers at different levels with different amounts available, and your order consumes that queue from the best price outwards. If you ask for more than exists at the top level, the rest of your order fills at the next level down. That is slippage in its purest form, and no broker anywhere can remove it.

Time is the second cause. Between your click and the moment your order reaches the venue, the market carries on moving. On a quiet afternoon that gap is invisible. In the seconds around an economic release, prices can move a long way in the time it takes a message to travel, and the price you clicked may simply no longer exist. This is why slippage clusters so heavily around scheduled events, session opens, the daily rollover and the reopen after a weekend.

A requote is a different mechanism with the same root cause. Instead of filling your order at whatever is available, the broker comes back and offers you a new price, asking whether you accept. Requotes are associated with dealing-desk execution, where the broker is quoting to you directly rather than routing you to a venue. They are far less common than they once were, and a broker that requotes you persistently on ordinary orders in normal conditions is worth reassessing, see execution models.

Here is the part that changes how traders think about it. Slippage should occur in both directions. Sometimes the market moves in your favour between click and fill and you get a better price than you asked for. Genuinely neutral execution produces a scatter of positive and negative fills that roughly balance out around a small net cost. What is not normal is a heavy, persistent one-sided skew against you on ordinary orders in ordinary conditions. That is measurable, and measuring it is the only way to tell an execution problem from a run of bad luck, or from a strategy that places stops exactly where everyone else places them.

How to trade it, step by step

1. Start logging intended price against fill price. For every order, record what you asked for, what you got, the timestamp, the order type and the instrument. Most platforms export this in the trade history. Without this data every discussion about slippage is guesswork and emotion.
2. Separate the log by order type. Market orders, stop orders, stop-loss triggers and limit orders behave completely differently. A limit order should never fill worse than its price; a market order can. Mixing them in one average hides the only pattern worth seeing.
3. Split the results into positive and negative slippage and count both. Count how many fills were better than requested and how many were worse, and total the value of each. If the two sides are broadly comparable with a small net negative, your execution is behaving normally. A large, persistent skew against you is a finding.
4. Segment by time of day and by event. Tag each order with its session and note whether it fell within a few minutes of a scheduled release. Slippage almost always concentrates in those windows. If yours does, the problem is your timing, not your broker.
5. Check where your stops are actually placed. Stops sitting a pip beyond an obvious swing high or a round number sit in the same place as everyone else’s. When that cluster is taken out, all of those orders become market orders at once and fill through thin liquidity. That is a liquidity phenomenon, not a broker one, and moving the stop to a level with a structural reason fixes it.
6. Use limit or stop-limit orders where your strategy can tolerate a missed fill. A limit order caps your price at the cost of sometimes not trading at all. For mean-reversion and pullback entries that is usually an acceptable trade; for breakout entries where being in matters more than the exact price, it usually is not.
7. Set a maximum deviation on market orders if your platform supports it. Many platforms allow you to specify how much slippage you will accept before the order is rejected. This converts an unbounded price risk into a fill-or-nothing decision, which is often the better of the two.
8. Stop placing ordinary orders into the first seconds of a scheduled release. Look at the economic calendar before you trade and treat the minutes either side of a major print as a period for managing existing risk rather than opening new positions. This single habit removes most of the worst fills a retail trader ever gets.
9. Size for a fill worse than your stop. Assume, when calculating position size, that a stop may fill some distance beyond its level in bad conditions. Use the position size calculator with a conservative stop distance so that a gap does not turn a planned one percent loss into something much larger.

Size every one of those entries with the position size calculator and check the trade is worth taking with the risk/reward calculator before you commit.

The conditions it needs

Slippage occurs in both directions

The clearest sign of healthy execution is a scatter of fills better and worse than requested, with a modest net cost. Positive slippage should appear in your log regularly. If it never does, that asymmetry is the single most informative number you can produce about your broker.

You avoid the windows where it concentrates

Most severe slippage happens in a handful of predictable moments: the seconds around scheduled data, the first minutes of a session, the daily rollover and the weekend reopen. Simply not placing discretionary orders in those windows removes the bulk of the problem without any change of broker.

Your order type matches what you actually need

Market orders when execution matters more than price, limit orders when price matters more than execution. Traders who understand which of the two their strategy requires get far better outcomes than those who use market orders for everything out of habit.

Stops are placed where there is a structural reason

A stop beyond a genuine structural level, with a small buffer, sits in a different place from the obvious cluster. It gets hit less often by liquidity sweeps and, when it does get hit, it fills in less frantic conditions. See liquidity sweeps for what happens at those clusters.

Position size assumes the fill can be worse than planned

The trader who sized for a stop filling well beyond its level takes an unpleasant fill and moves on. The trader who sized assuming a perfect fill takes the same event as an account-level problem. Same market, different preparation.

When it fails

• Concluding your broker hunts stops without any data. It is the most common accusation in retail trading and usually the least evidenced. Before reaching that conclusion, log a few hundred fills and check the slippage distribution. Most of the time it turns out the stops were placed at obvious levels, or the fills were around news, or the sample was five bad trades in a bad week.
• Placing market orders into a scheduled release. Trading a data print with a market order and a tight stop is the highest-slippage activity available to a retail trader. Spreads widen, depth vanishes, and both your entry and your stop can fill a long way from where you intended.
• Assuming a stop-loss guarantees your price. A stop is an instruction, not a contract. Once triggered it becomes a market order and fills at whatever is available. In gaps (weekends, shocks, unscheduled announcements) that can be far beyond your level. Only an explicitly guaranteed stop, where offered and usually paid for, changes this.
• Using limit orders where you cannot afford to miss the trade. The mirror-image error. A limit entry on a breakout that runs without you costs you the entire move, which is far more expensive than the slippage you avoided. Match the order type to what the strategy actually needs.
• Trading in thin conditions and blaming the fills. Late Friday, public holidays, the illiquid hours between sessions and exotic instruments all have less depth. Poor fills there are the market telling you there is nobody to trade with, not evidence of misconduct.
• Switching brokers on a handful of bad fills. Small samples in emotional periods produce confident wrong conclusions. Broker-hopping resets your data every time and guarantees you never accumulate enough evidence anywhere to know whether the execution was actually the problem.

For different levels of experience

If you are brand new

When you click buy, you are asking for the price on the screen. By the time your order arrives, the price may have moved, or there may not be enough available at that exact level. You get filled at the next best price instead. That difference is slippage.

It works both ways. Sometimes you get a slightly better price than you asked for. Over many trades those should roughly balance, with a small net cost. If you are only ever getting worse prices, that is worth investigating, but you need dozens of trades before that means anything.

Two things to understand early. First, a stop loss is not a guaranteed price; it is an instruction to get out at the best price available once the level is reached, and in fast markets that can be worse than you planned. Second, the worst fills happen around big news announcements and at session opens. Avoiding those moments removes most of the problem. Check an economic calendar before you trade, and do not place orders in the seconds around a major release.

If your results are inconsistent

This is the stage where traders become convinced the broker is against them. Occasionally that is true. Far more often the log tells a different story, so build the log: intended price, fill price, timestamp, order type, instrument. Two months of that data settles the question permanently.

When you look at it, ask three questions. Does positive slippage ever appear? Does the negative slippage cluster around news and session opens? And where are your stops sitting relative to obvious swing points and round numbers? In most cases the answers point at timing and stop placement rather than at execution.

The practical adjustments follow from that. Move stops to levels with structural justification plus a buffer rather than to the tightest visually appealing spot. Set a maximum deviation on market orders. Stop opening positions into scheduled releases. And feed your measured average slippage into your expectancy calculation, because it is a real cost that most traders leave out.

If you are experienced

Fill quality is a measurable execution cost and should be treated as one. Track effective spread paid on filled orders, slippage distribution by order type, rejection rate, and mark-out over the seconds following each fill. Mark-outs matter most: consistent adverse movement immediately after your fills says something about how your flow is being handled that no execution policy document will admit.

Segment everything: by session, by instrument, by size, and by proximity to scheduled events. Aggregate slippage numbers hide the structure. A venue can be excellent in the London morning and poor at the reopen, and knowing which is which changes when you work orders rather than which broker you use.

At larger sizes, market impact becomes your own contribution to slippage. Consuming several levels of depth in one clip moves the price you are trading against. Working the order in pieces, using limit orders where the strategy permits, and avoiding the thinnest windows all reduce that. And run a second regulated venue continuously so you always have a live benchmark rather than a one-off comparison at onboarding, see execution models.

Risk management for this strategy

Slippage is the reason your maximum loss on a trade is not exactly your stop distance. It is your stop distance plus whatever the fill gives away, and in the events that matter most (gaps, shocks, unscheduled announcements) that gap can be several times the planned risk. Any risk framework that assumes stops fill precisely is understating its own tail.

The practical response is to build a margin of error into sizing rather than into hope. Size the position so that a fill meaningfully beyond your stop is survivable, and be more conservative on instruments and sessions that gap. That is not pessimism; it is the difference between a bad day and a structural problem. Position sizing and risk management both assume this buffer exists.

Weekend exposure deserves separate thought. A position held over the weekend has no stop protection at all until the market reopens, because a stop cannot execute in a closed market. If the reopen gaps through your level, you exit at the gap. Reducing size before the weekend, or being flat into known event risk, is a cheaper solution than any order type.

Where Market Structure Pro fits

Most severe slippage is not random. It happens in identifiable conditions: thin liquidity, widening spreads, session transitions and the moments when the market has no settled view. Market Structure Pro is built to recognise those conditions and say so.

It is spread-aware, reading the live spread from the chart rather than an assumed average, and spread widening is the most reliable real-time warning that fills are about to deteriorate. It is session-aware, so a setup appearing in the dead hours is graded for what those hours actually are. And its dedicated ranging filter is designed to return NO TRADE in choppy or lifeless conditions, which overlaps almost exactly with the conditions that produce the fills traders complain about.

The output is one verdict with a confidence percentage, an A/B/C grade and a plain-English reason. Because it is non-repainting and locks on the closed bar, you can pair it with your fill log and ask a much sharper question than usual: are the bad fills concentrated in the setups MSP graded poorly, or are they spread evenly across everything? That is a diagnosis rather than a suspicion. MSP is decision support on an MT5 chart; it does not place trades, it is not a signal service, and it cannot control what price you are filled at.

Frequently asked questions

What is slippage in trading?

Slippage is the difference between the price you intended to trade at and the price your order actually filled at. It happens because the market moves between your click and your order arriving, or because there was not enough volume available at your price. It can be negative or positive, and both should appear in a healthy fill record.

Why did my order fill at a worse price than I clicked?

Either the market moved in the time it took your order to reach the venue, or the amount available at your price was smaller than your order and the remainder filled at the next level. Both are normal market mechanics, and both get dramatically worse around news releases, session opens and the weekend reopen.

Is slippage my broker cheating me?

Not usually, but it is worth measuring rather than assuming either way. Log intended and actual fill prices across a few hundred orders and check whether positive slippage ever occurs and whether the negative slippage clusters around news and session opens. A persistent one-sided skew on ordinary orders in normal conditions is a genuine finding; a handful of bad fills in a volatile week is not.

What is a requote?

A requote is when your broker declines to fill your order at the requested price and offers you a new one to accept or reject. It is associated with dealing-desk execution where the broker quotes directly to you. Occasional requotes in fast markets are understandable; persistent requotes on ordinary orders in calm conditions are a reason to reassess the broker.

Can slippage work in my favour?

Yes. If the market moves in your direction between click and fill, you get a better price than you asked for. Positive slippage appearing regularly in your trade log is one of the better indicators that your execution is being handled neutrally.

Does a stop loss guarantee my exit price?

No. A stop loss is an instruction to exit at the best available price once your level trades, so it becomes a market order at that moment. In gaps and fast markets it can fill significantly beyond your level. Only an explicitly guaranteed stop, which some brokers offer for a fee, provides a fixed price.

How can I reduce slippage?

Avoid placing orders in the seconds around scheduled data releases and at session opens, use limit orders where your strategy can tolerate a missed fill, set a maximum deviation on market orders if your platform allows it, and place stops at structurally justified levels rather than just beyond obvious highs and lows where everyone else’s sit.

Why does my stop get hit and then price reverses?

Most often because the stop was placed where the majority of stops sit: just beyond an obvious swing point or a round number. When that cluster is triggered, a wave of market orders fills through thin liquidity and price frequently snaps back. The fix is stop placement based on structure with a buffer, not a different broker.

Is slippage worse on some instruments than others?

Yes. Instruments with deep, continuous liquidity generally slip less than thin ones, and everything slips more outside its main trading hours, on holidays, and around events specific to it. Exotic pairs and lightly traded CFDs show it most, which is one reason they punish tight-stop strategies.

Related reading

• ECN, STP and market makers: How the execution model behind your account shapes the fills you get.
• Understanding trading costs: Slippage is a real cost, here is how it fits with the ones you can see.
• Liquidity: Why depth disappears at exactly the moments your fills get worse.
• Position size calculator: Size for a fill worse than your stop, not for a perfect one.
• Risk management: The buffer that turns a bad fill into an inconvenience rather than a problem.