Documenting requotes before deciding to switch broker

[FXS London Scalper]

Requotes are frustrating, and frustration is a bad basis for switching brokers. A few weeks of notes will tell you whether the problem is the broker, the account type or your own timing.

What to record each time:

• Date, time (UTC), symbol.
• Order type and requested price.
• Requoted price and difference in points.
• Whether a news event was within 5 minutes.
• Whether you accepted or rejected the new price.

Then split the count two ways: requotes inside news windows and requotes outside them. Hypothetically, if you see 30 requotes on 400 orders, that's 7.5%, which sounds bad. But if 23 of them came within 5 minutes of high-impact news, the rate outside news is 7 in roughly 370, under 2%. That points at timing on an instant-execution account rather than at the broker in general.

In that case the cheaper fix is often a market-execution account at the same broker. Requotes go away and are replaced by slippage, which at least shows up in the fill and can be measured and included in costs.

If the outside-news rate is still high, you have a documented case to take to support, with timestamps, which gets a far better response than a complaint from memory.

Has anyone documented requotes like this and taken it to support? Did it change anything?

[Shadow Trader]

They get lumped together, but they say different things about how an order is handled.

A requote means the server declined the price and offered a new one, usually under instant execution, where the broker holds the order briefly and decides. Slippage means the order went to market and filled at whatever was available, better or worse.

Neither is automatically good or bad. Requotes protect against terrible fills but also let the broker pick the moment of entry. Slippage is honest but brutal when the book is thin.

Clusters tell the story. Requotes bunched in the thirty seconds after news mean something different from requotes at random during quiet London mornings. The execution mode is usually a dropdown in the platform settings, and it's worth knowing which one is active before judging the broker on either behaviour.

Which of the two has been more tolerable in actual scalping, and why?