Chart looks alive but quotes are stale

[Amanhasnoname]

Connection indicator green, clock in Market Watch ticking, chart looks completely normal, and yet the price has not moved for eight seconds on a pair that usually ticks several times a second. Anyone who scalps long enough has met this.

The status bars reflect the connection to the trade server, not the health of the quote stream. A socket can stay open while the data flow stalls or crawls, for example after a brief routing problem or a busy server. The danger is that nothing looks wrong. Entries get sent against a price that no longer exists, and the result is a rejection, a big slip, or a fill that makes no sense against the real market.

A simple defence is a tiny indicator or EA that stores the time of the last tick and raises an alert, or blocks entries, when the gap exceeds a threshold. Thresholds have to depend on pair and hour. Three seconds without a tick on a major in the London session is suspicious; the same gap on an exotic in the late Asian session is just normal.

Also worth having: a second quote source, even a phone app on a different connection, to confirm whether the stall is local or at the broker.

Last-tick age is a better health signal than the connection bars.

What gap threshold works for alerts on majors without constant false alarms in quiet hours?