A filtered feed hides the moves a scalper might want

[Fairman]

A filtered feed hides the moves a scalper might want

Some brokers filter their price feed to remove outliers and bad ticks. Filtering is a reasonable thing to do. It also changes the market the trader sees.

Aggressive filters smooth the price. Small spikes vanish. Rapid reversals are shortened. The chart looks cleaner than the underlying market.

A scalper whose strategy depends on fast reversals or short spikes loses part of the edge on such a feed. The setups appear less often, or the entries come later than they would on a raw feed.

Conversely, strategies that struggle with noise may do better on a filtered feed. The broker's choices become part of the strategy's environment.

Questions worth asking: does the broker publish a filtering policy, how are outliers defined, and what happens to filtered ticks? Some brokers drop them from the chart but still apply them in execution, which causes odd mismatches.

Comparing candle highs and lows with a raw feed from another source quantifies the effect.

Does the broker's feed look smoother than a raw feed on the same pair, and by how much?