Quote stuffing in raw feeds is mostly an excuse for bad fills

[Shadow Trader]

Blunt take: quote stuffing is blamed for far more than it deserves in retail FX.

The textbook version is a flood of orders and cancels designed to slow rivals or hide real activity. That is a real thing in exchange-traded markets with a single book and a tape that can be flooded. In decentralised spot FX, a retail trader sees a feed that has already been aggregated, throttled and sometimes conflated by the broker. Most of the rapid-fire quote changes visible on a raw tick export are just several providers updating, not an attack on anyone.

The reason the claim persists is convenient. A bad fill on a fast spike gets filed under stuffing and the feed gets blamed, when the actual culprits are usually ordinary: latency between the platform and server, wide spreads at that moment, last look rejecting at a worse price, or a thin top of book.

There is a legitimate version of the worry, though. High tick rates can make a platform lag, especially on a cluttered terminal with many charts and indicators. When the client falls behind the feed, prices on screen are stale, and orders are sent at levels that are already gone. That is a local problem and it is fixable by cutting symbols, indicators and chart loads, or by trading from a VPS closer to the server.

So the useful test is not looking for stuffing. It is comparing timestamps: when price changed on the feed, when the platform showed it, and when the order was acknowledged.

Has anyone actually measured the gap between feed time and platform display on a busy news candle, and what did it come out to?