forex-scalping.com

"Sub-millisecond latency to major trading venues" is printed on half the VPS sales pages I've read this year. It's usually true in a narrow sense and nearly useless in the way most of us read it.

What the number usually describes is the network round trip between the hosting provider's data centre and a particular piece of infrastructure, often a well-known exchange or broker data centre in London, New York or Tokyo. If your broker's trade server sits in that same building, great. If it sits somewhere else, the advertised figure tells you very little.

What actually matters for my orders is the full chain: my click, the terminal, the VPS network, the broker's bridge, their pricing engine and back. Network ping is one link. On my own logs the network part is around 1 ms from a London VPS, yet the time from sending an order to seeing it confirmed in the terminal is typically 30 to 90 ms. Most of that delay isn't something hosting can fix.

So now I ignore the brochure and test ping to my broker's actual trade server, plus order confirmation times during 08:00 to 08:15, for a week.

A provider that gives me 2 ms every time beats one that gives me 0.4 ms most of the time and 40 ms when London opens.

The 30 to 90 ms confirmation time is the number most people never look at, so thanks for putting real figures on it. In my logs the spread of that number matters more than the average.

I tested two providers for a week each at the London open. One averaged 48 ms to confirmation with a worst case of 70. The other averaged 31 ms but had six orders over 300 ms in the first five minutes after 08:00. I kept the slower one.

Another edge case worth mentioning is the terminal itself. An MT4 with dozens of charts and a couple of heavy indicators on a small VPS can add more delay than the network. When I cut my VPS terminal down to four charts with no custom indicators, confirmation time dropped noticeably.

I'd also check the time sync on the VPS. If the clock drifts, your logs lie to you.

When you measured 08:00 to 08:15, did you split market orders from pending orders? My pending fills behaved quite differently.