Ping is not the number to worry about, jitter is

[Amanhasnoname]

A stable 40 millisecond connection is better for scalping than one that averages 15 but spikes to 300 several times an hour. Average ping hides exactly the thing that hurts.

Jitter is the variation between packets. High jitter means orders occasionally arrive late, and late orders are filled at worse prices or rejected. The average looks good while a few trades per day suffer.

Measuring it is easy. Run a continuous ping to the broker's server for a few hours during active sessions and look at the maximum and the spread, not just the mean. Many free tools show a graph with outliers marked.

Typical causes include Wi-Fi interference, congested home networks, background downloads, and ISP routing problems at peak hours. A wired connection and a quiet network often cut jitter dramatically.

If the spikes line up with certain times, such as evenings when neighbors stream video, the problem is the line and not the broker.

What does a long ping test reveal about the connection, and has jitter ever explained a string of bad fills?