Every trading support team in the world receives some version of this email. A trader sets a stop loss at 1.0800. The US jobs report comes out, and the trade closes at 1.0785. Ten minutes later: “Your platform stole 15 pips from me.”

Did the platform steal anything? Almost never. The price skipped straight past 1.0800 without trading there, and the order filled at the first price available.

You met this problem in Chapter 1, when a Sell Stop filled 15 pips late during a news release. Today we follow an order from your click to its fill, step by step. By the end of this lesson, you’ll know what slippage is and when to expect it, what a requote is and why some platforms ask you to accept a new price, how execution speed gets measured, and which habits cut your execution costs on every trade.

Part 1: The Journey of a Click

Click Buy, and your order sets off on a trip. The order leaves your laptop, passes through your internet provider, reaches the trading server, gets matched against a price, and the confirmation travels all the way back to your screen.

Each leg takes time, measured in milliseconds. A trader in London connected to a server in London waits a few milliseconds for the round trip. A trader in Sydney connected to the same London server waits roughly 250 milliseconds, because data needs time to cross the planet, even through fibre.

A quarter of a second sounds harmless. During busy hours, though, EUR/USD updates many times per second. The price on your screen at the moment of the click and the price at the moment of the fill are two different snapshots. Most of the time, the gap between them is zero or close to zero. Sometimes the gap is large. The rest of this lesson explains when and why.

Part 2: Slippage

Slippage is the difference between the price you expected and the price you got.

Say you buy EUR/USD with a market order when the ask shows 1.0851, and your fill comes back at 1.0853. Two pips of negative slippage. On 0.5 lots, at $5 per pip, the slip costs you $10 before the trade has done anything.

Slippage works in both directions. If the price drops between your click and the fill, you buy at 1.0850 instead, one pip better than you asked for. Traders rarely complain about positive slippage, so you hear less about it, but positive slippage happens every day on a fair execution system.

So what causes large slippage? Four situations cover most cases.

• News releases. Around a central bank decision or a jobs report, prices jump in steps instead of moving smoothly, and liquidity providers pull their quotes for a few seconds.
• Thin liquidity. At the daily rollover, around 5 pm New York time, many banks step away from the market. Fewer prices on offer means wider spreads and bigger jumps.
• Weekend gaps. Markets close on Friday and reopen on Sunday evening. If big news breaks in between, Monday’s first price lands far from Friday’s last price.
• Order size. Each price level holds a limited volume. A small order fills in full at the best price. A large order eats through several levels, and the average fill gets worse.

Now connect this to Chapter 1. Which orders slip? Market orders and stop orders, including your stop loss, fill at the next available price, so they carry slippage risk. Limit orders, including your take profit, fill at your price or better. A limit order never slips against you. The price you pay for this protection is the chance of no fill at all.

Part 3: Requotes

A requote is the platform’s way of saying “the price moved, do you still want the trade at this new price?”

MT5 supports several execution modes, and the broker or firm chooses which one applies to each account. Two matter for you.

Instant execution. You request a trade at the price on screen, with a maximum deviation you set in the order window. If the price moves beyond your deviation before the order fills, the platform sends a requote, a pop-up offering the new price with a few seconds to accept or reject. Accept, and you trade at the new price. Reject, or wait too long, and nothing happens.

Market execution. You request a trade, and the order fills at the best available price, full stop. No requotes. Slippage takes their place.

A quick note on units. MT5 measures deviation in points, not pips. On a five-digit EUR/USD price such as 1.08505, one point is the last digit, and 10 points equal one pip. Type 20 points and you’ve allowed two pips of movement.

Which mode is better? Each has a trade-off. Instant execution protects your price but sometimes costs you the trade, usually at the exact moment you wanted in. Market execution always gets you in, but the price floats. Look back at the MT5 order window from Chapter 3. The Type field said Market Execution. On those accounts, you’ll see slippage instead of requotes, and your planning should assume so.

Part 4: Execution Speed

Execution speed, or latency, measures how long your order takes to reach the server and come back as a fill. Lower latency means a smaller window for the price to move.

MT5 shows your connection speed in the bottom right corner of the screen, next to the connection bar. Click the bar, and you’ll see a figure in milliseconds for each available server. Under 50 milliseconds is comfortable for most traders. Over 200 milliseconds deserves a look at your connection.

Where the servers sit matters too. Moneta Markets runs trading infrastructure in three Equinix data centres: London LD4, New York NY4 and Tokyo TY3. Those buildings host the systems of many banks and liquidity providers, so the distance between the trading server and the prices shrinks to metres of cable.

The last leg, from your desk to the server, belongs to you. A few habits help:

• Use a wired connection for active trading. Home wifi adds delay and drops packets at the worst moments.
• Close heavy downloads and video streams while you trade.
• If you run an expert advisor around the clock, consider a VPS, a remote computer hosted near the trading server, so your laptop going to sleep doesn’t stop your strategy.

Now the honest part. Speed matters most for scalpers. If you aim for 5 pips in five minutes, 200 milliseconds of delay changes your results. If you hold a swing trade for three days, nobody will ever notice the difference between 20 and 80 milliseconds. And no connection on Earth fixes news slippage, because the problem sits in the market, not in your cable.

Part 5: The Hidden Cost in the Spread

Slippage isn’t the only execution cost which changes with conditions. The spread moves too.

On EUR/USD during the London and New York overlap, spreads sit near their tightest. At the 5 pm New York rollover, the same spread often widens several times over for a few minutes. Open a trade in the middle of the rollover, and you pay the wide spread on entry. Hold a short trade through the rollover with a tight stop, and Chapter 2 already told you what happens: the ask jumps up, the stop triggers, and the bid line on your chart never moved.

Here’s a simple rule. Before any trade, glance at the spread. If the spread looks two or three times wider than normal for the pair, wait a few minutes.

Part 6: Habits Which Cut Execution Costs

Put everything together, and a short checklist appears.

1. Check the economic calendar every morning. Avoid opening market orders in the minutes around high-impact releases, unless news trading is part of your plan and your account allows the strategy.
2. Use limit orders for entries when your plan allows. A pullback entry at support costs you nothing in slippage.
3. Give every stop loss a small buffer beyond the level, as Chapter 2 taught.
4. Trade during liquid sessions. Module 1, Chapter 4 showed you where the volume lives.
5. Size every position for a bad fill, not only the perfect one.

Pop Quiz

You hold 0.5 lots of EUR/USD long, worth $5 per pip, with a stop loss 25 pips away at 1.0820. CPI data comes out, the price gaps lower, and your stop fills at 1.0812. How much did slippage cost you, and what was your total loss?

The stop filled 8 pips beyond 1.0820. At $5 per pip, slippage cost $40. Your planned loss was 25 pips, or $125, so the real loss came to $165. Bonus question: which of your two exit orders could never have slipped against you? The take profit, because a take profit is a limit order. Two out of two? Top marks.

Why This Matters on a Moneta Funded Account

The daily loss limit counts what happened, not what you planned. On a $10,000 Instant Funding account, the limit sits at $300. Plan three trades at $100 risk each, let news slippage add $40 to each stop, and you’ve lost $420. Account rules don’t bend for slippage.

News rules also differ by account. The Sprint Challenge doesn’t allow news trading. Instant Funding Pro does. Check your own account’s rules on the General Rules page before you trade around a release. Most prop firms also ban strategies built to exploit price delays between feeds, such as latency arbitrage, so read the rules before you run any high-speed tool.

Up Next: Chapter 5

Stay tuned, because the next chapter answers a question most traders never ask: who sits on the other side of my trade? You’ll learn how market makers, STP brokers and ECN brokers handle your orders, what the A-book and B-book labels mean, how regulation fits in, and what Moneta Markets backing means for you as a Moneta Funded trader. Knowing who handles your orders tells you how much to trust the prices you see. See you in class.

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Trading forex and CFDs involves significant risk of loss. Figures used in examples are for illustration only. Execution modes, spreads and latency vary by platform, account, location and market conditions. Stop loss orders do not guarantee execution at the specified price. Moneta Funded accounts use simulated capital for evaluation purposes.