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How often your broker sends a new quote in quiet hours

During London the price on a major changes many times a second. In the hour or two after New York closes, it might sit still for several seconds at a time. How often your broker sends a new quote in those quiet hours tells you something about the feed and how it's built.

Some brokers stream every change from their liquidity providers. Others filter or aggregate quotes, sending only when the price moves by a set amount or after a short time interval. Both approaches are common. They just give different pictures of a quiet market.

Why should a scalper care? A few reasons.

Indicators that use tick count, such as tick volume, will look very different on a filtered feed than on a raw one. Comparing tick volume across brokers isn't meaningful for that reason.

Stops and limits are triggered by the quotes the broker sends. A thinner feed means fewer chances for an order to trigger at an intermediate price, which can matter for tight stops in quiet hours.

If an EA reacts on each tick, it will behave differently on a thin feed, sometimes waiting much longer than expected for its next calculation.

To get a rough read on your broker, count ticks per minute in a quiet hour and in a busy hour over a few days. Most platforms let you record this with a short script. The ratio between the two can tell you more about the feed than any marketing page.

Weekends and holidays show the extremes. On a public holiday in a major centre the quote rate on some pairs drops close to nothing for long stretches. If you happen to trade then, the chart may show long flat bars that hide how illiquid the market really is. Treating holiday sessions as a separate category, with their own rules about whether to trade at all, follows from seeing how sparse the feed actually gets on those days. It's often a clearer signal to stay away than spread alone. Around the Christmas and New Year period this can last for days, not just a single session.

This also lets you compare two brokers without opening live accounts with both. A demo feed isn't always identical to the live one, but the quote rate on a demo usually gives a rough idea. If one broker sends ten times more updates per minute than another on the same pair at the same hour, the difference is in how they build their feed, and that's useful information when choosing where to put real money for a scalping style. Check at the same hours across both, since quote rates change a lot between sessions and comparing a busy hour on one with a quiet hour on the other tells you nothing.

A very high quote rate isn't automatically better. Some feeds include a lot of tiny changes that are mostly noise, and an EA processing every tick can spend a lot of time on updates that don't matter. Some algo traders deliberately throttle their own processing to once every few hundred milliseconds to avoid that. The point of measuring the feed isn't to find the busiest one, it's to understand what you're working with so your tools are built around it. It's more about knowing whether a tick based rule in your code will fire often enough to be useful, or will sit waiting during exactly the hours when you need it to act. Adding a timer event alongside the tick event is a common way to make sure the logic still runs regularly even on a thin feed.

On MT4 and MT5 the platform itself can lose ticks if the terminal is busy or the connection is slow. So a low tick count in your own recording might come from your setup rather than the broker. Running the same count on a VPS close to the broker's server, and comparing it to a home connection, can tell you which side the gap is on. If the VPS shows many more ticks, the feed is fine and the problem is local. If the home connection is the problem, a VPS might be a cheap fix. If both show the same thin feed, it's simply how the broker builds its quotes, and that's something to weigh when picking a broker for tick sensitive strategies.

Quote frequency in quiet hours is a good diagnostic. A simple test is to count ticks per minute on EURUSD at 22:30 London and compare brokers. A feed that updates every few seconds and one that updates every half second may show the same chart, but scalping strategies that rely on precise entries will behave differently. Comparing tick counts at the London open too is useful, since some feeds that look normal there filter heavily in the quiet hours.