Hi xxxTRADERxxx,
Thanks for your post. I’ll address each of your questions in turn.
1. What is it about requotes everybody talks about with Alpari?
Requotes have been around ever since markets were allowed to float and are a natural consequence of that.
If you are trading with the momentum of the market, and therefore by definition in the direction of least liquidity, then requotes are an inescapable fact of life that everyone has to deal with, from the busiest InterBank desks to the smallest retail trader.
To minimize re-quotes:
a. “Enable the maximum deviation for quoted price” checkbox and set it above 10. This implies the max deviation is just 1 pip. To prevent re-quotes during volatile trading times, you may want to set the max deviation between 10 to 40 points (1 to 4 pips).
b. If you use an MT4 indicator to detect spread widening, please make sure that your indicator is configured for the 5 decimal pricing system that we use. Otherwise a 3 pip spread-widening will be shown as 30 pips by the indicator.
c. Another thing to consider is your internet connection to our servers. Test your latency by pinging the Alpari trading servers or just ping alpari.co.uk. If your latency is high (higher ms numbers), then this is one of the factor causing your orders to be re-quoted.
For example, let’s say a client is complaining about re-quotes. He gives us an account number and we pull the logs. We find that we received his order at let’s say, 9:01:11 and sent the execution back at 9:01:12, so less than a second. He claims it took two minutes and was requoted. Now, his logs showed that the order was placed by him (manually) at 8: 59:50. So, yes, assuming all timestamps are correct, that looks like 2 minutes, but we can clearly see that from the time it was received on our end until the time of execution it was barely only a second, hardly a bad time.
Traders in UK and Europe enjoy significantly lower latencies (hence higher speed execution) and experience almost no re-quotes (when maximum deviation setting is correct) than other traders usually in Asia, Australia, Africa or in countries where the internet is routed via proxies such as Saudi Arabia.
2. What about SL hunting? Is that even possible? I thought there are no human intervention.
3. What about taking double spreads?
Alpari (UK) does not stop hunt nor take double spreads.
We have always maintained transparency and encouraged our clients to approach us should they at all experience any specific issues. Should you or anyone else have any particular concerns that you would like to discuss, email us at <[email protected]> . We’re here to help.
Alex
Alexander Chadwick
Alpari (UK) Representative