Winning streaks and account flags: does the dealing desk notice?

[Fairman]

Winning streaks and account flags: does the dealing desk notice?

Anecdotes pile up in every forum: consistent profit for a few weeks, then execution quality drops. Slower fills, wider spreads, more requotes. The suspicion is that the broker tagged the account as toxic flow.

It is worth keeping an open mind. Some of those changes come from market conditions or from larger position sizes. But brokers that internalize flow do monitor client profitability and apply rules. Account-level tweaks can include added latency, price filtering, or reduced leverage.

A way to test is to open a small second account at the same broker or a different one and run the same trades. If the second account shows normal execution while the winning account shows degradation, the difference points to account-level treatment instead of the market.

Keep the evidence. Dated logs with signal prices, fill prices, and fill times make any complaint to the broker or a regulator much stronger than a vague feeling.

Has anyone confirmed account-level treatment by running a control account?

[Amanhasnoname]

I had the same suspicion after a very good month on a standard account, and what convinced me to test it was a mix of slower fills and a spread that looked half a pip wider on my entries than on the quote screen. I opened a small second account at the same broker and ran the same signals by hand for ten days with a stopwatch on each order.

The result was mixed. The main account showed an average delay of about 0.9 seconds and the control about 0.4, but most of the difference sat in the first minutes after news, when both were slow. Outside those windows the two accounts were close, so I could not honestly say I was being flagged, though I did switch to a broker with a clearer execution policy afterwards.

What I would recommend is keeping a log with the signal time, the requested price, the fill price and the fill time for every trade. Without those four fields, any complaint turns into one person's feeling against the broker's word.