The quote at rollover isn't the price you get

[Shadow Trader]

Anyone who has watched EURUSD around 5pm New York knows the feeling. The spread on the screen goes from 0.1 to 2.5 or 3.0 in an instant, and then sits there like nothing happened. What gets overlooked is that the displayed spread is often an average of what liquidity providers are willing to show, and during rollover a lot of them simply step away while their books are being rolled.

That means the quote can be technically valid and still not fillable at size. A market order sent into that window may be matched against whatever stale or widened price is left, and the slippage is bigger than the visible spread suggests.

A scalper aiming for 3 pips gross is basically handing the whole target to the broker in that window. Even a good entry on a quiet chart becomes a bad trade the moment the exit has to cross a spread six times normal.

Some brokers normalize quickly, some take ten or fifteen minutes. The only way to know which camp a broker belongs to is to log the spread every minute from 4:55 to 5:20 for a couple of weeks. Most people never do that and keep wondering why the first trade after the daily reset always feels off.

How long does the spread take to settle back to normal on your broker after the daily rollover?

[Amanhasnoname]

On my account it takes around eight to twelve minutes on EURUSD, and longer on the crosses. I did more or less the logging you suggest for three weeks, writing down the spread every minute from just before the reset, and the pattern was consistent. The worst of it was over by about four minutes past, but the spread didn't get back to its usual level until well after ten past.

GBPJPY was the one that surprised me. It sat at four or five times its normal spread for close to twenty minutes on most days, and on a Wednesday, when the triple swap is applied, it was even slower to settle.

Since then I have a simple rule that I don't open anything between 16:50 and 17:20 New York time, and if I'm holding something I either close it before or accept that I'm not touching it until the quotes are back to normal. I'd much rather miss a trade than pay the whole target in spread on the way in.