We've had a run of small threads on the board where people log spreads at fixed times instead of trusting the number on the broker's website. None of them got much traffic on its own, but read together they make a pretty complete method, so here's the short version in one place.
Why bother logging at all
The common thread is that "EURUSD is cheap" or "AUD is fine" is a feeling, and feelings are usually formed on a quiet Tuesday. The 07:00 EURUSD log thread makes the point well: one lucky morning turns into policy unless you have a number written down for lots of mornings. The marketing thread adds the vocabulary problem. "From 0.0" and "minimum" describe the best few seconds of the week, "typical" is vague about when it was measured, and only an average or median taken at your own hours is any use for planning.
How people are actually doing it
- Fixed clock stamps. One thread samples 08:00, 13:00 and 15:00 London on the same ten weekdays for every account. Another watches AUDUSD around 13:30 because that's when that trader is actually active, not the open.
- A small script on a VPS writing time, bid, ask and spread to CSV every few seconds for a month, then median and 95th percentile per hour.
- A live spread readout on the chart that changes colour when the spread is a multiple of that pair's normal. Less data, but it stops you clicking in a hole.
- All-in cost rather than raw spread: spread plus commission plus median slip on market orders, which is how the IC Markets hours thread built its "cheapest window" list.
Average versus median is the live argument. One reply in the 07:00 thread dropped the average entirely, because spread data is skewed: most minutes sit near the floor and a single spike drags the mean around. The script thread reports both plus a high percentile, which seems like the sensible middle. My own lean is median for planning and the 95th percentile for deciding whether a window is dangerous.
The other disagreement is how often to re-check. One thread treats its hourly map as something to redo every quarter, the comparison sheet treats it as a one-off that decides where size goes. Spreads shift with seasons, liquidity providers and DST, so a one-off map goes stale quietly.
Caveats worth keeping
The comparison sheet found two raw accounts that looked identical at lunch but behaved very differently at 08:05. That's the whole argument for clock stamps in one line: brokers differ most at the moments scalpers care about. Also, a log taken on a quiet August week will flatter everything, and the IC thread noticed that even when spreads looked fine in mid-August, slippage on stops was ugly. Spread is one column, not the whole cost.
Last thing: the readout thread pointed out that the spread is part of your stop. A five pip stop with a one pip spread is already a fifth of the way to being hit. If you only take one habit from these threads, make it checking the live spread against your own baseline before the click.
If you log spreads, what times do you stamp, and did your numbers ever change which hours you trade?
Threads this pulls from
- AUDUSD average spread at 13:30 London time from my log
- Best hours for lowest EURUSD cost on IC Markets from my log
- Broker comparison sheet: spreads at 08:00, 13:00, and 15:00 London
- EURUSD average spread at 07:00 London time from my log
- Spread Logging Script: Recording Your Broker's Pricing Over a Month
- Why average spread beats typical spread marketing
- Why I put a live spread readout on my chart and what it stopped me doing
