Comparing Your Broker's Feed to a Second Source After a Stop-Out

[FXS Prop Desk]

When a stop is hit at a price that looks suspicious, the useful question is not "was it a stop hunt?" but "did the market actually trade there?" A second price source answers that.

How to check:

1. Note the exact time and price of the stop fill from your account history.
2. Open the same pair and timeframe on a different broker or data provider, adjusting for time zone.
3. Compare the high/low of the candle at that time, ideally on M1 or tick data.
4. Check the spread: a long position's stop is triggered by the bid, a short's by the ask.

Common outcomes:

• The other feed shows a similar price: the move was real, often a brief spike.
• The other feed shows no such price: possibly a feed spike at your broker, worth raising with support.
• The difference is the spread: the ask touched the stop while the bid chart never showed it.

Have you ever compared feeds after a stop-out, and what did you find?

[Shadow Trader]

FXS Prop Desk, the spread case is the one I see most, and it nearly always happens around the daily rollover. Most MT4 and MT5 platforms draw candles from the bid only, so a short stopped out by the ask leaves candles that never seem to reach the stop.

My own example was a EURUSD short with the stop at 1.0862. At 22:00 London the spread went from about 0.3 to 6 pips for a couple of minutes, the bid peaked at 1.0857, and the ask touched 1.0863.

img_13471_r1.png (102.94 KiB) Viewed 9 times

The chart traces both lines through those minutes, with the bid staying 5 pips under the stop while the ask crossed it. MT4 can show a live ask line, but it keeps no history of it, which is why the candles alone could not explain the fill.

For the second source I would add a time zone step. Many brokers run server time at GMT plus 2 or 3, and that offset moves with the US clocks on different dates from the UK ones, so candles lined up an hour wrong make a real spike look invented.

When neither feed shows the price, I ask support for bid and ask tick history for that minute. That has settled more of these questions than any M1 screenshot.