What the fifth decimal place is really for

[Shadow Trader]

Most brokers quote EURUSD to five decimals, such as 1.08425. The last digit is called a pipette, a tenth of a pip.

It helps brokers offer finer pricing and tighter spreads, since a spread of 0.4 pips can be shown as 4 points. It also gives more precise entries.

The side effect is confusion. Many platforms count "points" and "pips" differently. A stop of 50 points on a five-digit broker is only 5 pips. On a four-digit broker, the same number would mean 50 pips. Traders moving between brokers and automated systems have lost money from this mismatch.

Expert advisors sometimes assume a fixed number of digits, and an EA written for four decimals can behave oddly on five.

It is worth checking, on every new account, how the platform expresses pips and points, and testing with a tiny position before relying on any automated rule.

Has a point-versus-pip confusion ever caused an unexpected result here?