FINPROTRADING AND TURNKEYFOREX EXECUTION SPEED
Execution speed is not critical for most traders, but if you are a
scalper then, depending upon how you place your entries, it
will be a factor.
I had some discussion with FinProTrading technical support once,
complaining about execution times. Their claim was that once
they receive my order, then they take an average of 50 milliseconds
to execute it. But MT4 execution is subject to a number of
"layered factors".
With most MT4 brokers, your order first hits an “Aggregator” which
delays and tries to aggregate size from various brokerage clients,
before attempting execution; and then the trade is exposed
to Liquidity Providers for execution. This implies the brokerage
may execute an “aggregated trade” at least some proportion
of which is YOUR trade.
Brokers have the capability to flag your account to BYPASS the
Aggregator phase… But whether they will or not, is brokerage
dependent. I’m not saying you should ask for this, but if you
are “latency sensitive” then you should ask, especially if you
are able to do a higher level of business with the broker.
IN ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION: It varies, but a reasonable
expectation for Limit (MT4 pending) order placements is a
"round trip" time of perhaps 80 msecs best case, and for
Market Order fills, a best case of 120 msec or so…
These times may double x2 or even x3 rarely, with normal variability…
There is variability in these timings and, in my case, I have
multi threaded Java software, layered on top of the NJ4X
API which must perform interprocess communication to the
Terminal Server, where it selects which MT4 "terminal.exe"
will execute the order request. It may burn up 20 msecs
worst case in doing this, I’d guess.
How’s that for TMI (aka “too much information”) ? LOL
But I can tell you that for these brokers, which use TurnkeyFX.com
as the service provider, the executions are very very consistent,
and “slippage” is negligible. Obviously price can move a lot
in 100 milliseconds, but these are not usually on timescales
we ordinary traders care about…
If you consider what traders call “slippage”. Traders complain that
the broker does not give the price they are expecting. But usually
that is because they are “chasing” a fast moving price, so their
execution is worse than they wanted at the moment of submitting
a Market order. With Pending type orders, they convert to Market
Orders on the broker’s servers, and their “slippage” is almost
undetectible from a practical perspective.
I always use “slippage” to my advantage, by BUYing against a falling
price, and SELLing against a rising price. So any latency factors
or other slippage related factors, actually work in my favor.
BOTTOM LINE IS that these brokers are exceptionally consistent
and accurate, when you consider that these are only Retail
connections which support very small lot sizes down to 0.01
(1,000 Currency Units) at no penalty in execution…
hyperscalper
