My ping dropped 15 ms and my fills didn't change

[FXS London Scalper]

I moved my VPS from a provider 18 ms from my broker's server to one at about 3 ms. Expected better fills. After two months, the data says almost nothing changed for my style.

Comparison, EURUSD, about 250 trades each period:

• Average entry slippage: −0.08 pips before, −0.07 after.
• Average stop slippage: −0.18 before, −0.17 after.
• Requotes/rejections: zero both times.

Why so little effect? My trades are discretionary, held 2 to 20 minutes, entered by hand or with simple order placement. The time between my decision and the click is already hundreds of milliseconds. Saving 15 ms in the network is a rounding error.

Where lower latency would matter:

• EAs reacting to ticks within milliseconds.
• News trading in the first second.
• Arbitrage-style strategies (which most brokers don't want anyway).

The new VPS costs about €10 more per month. For my style it's not worth it, so I'm moving back. Stability and uptime were the same with both.

Did anyone else measure the difference after a latency upgrade? I suspect many of us pay for speed we don't use.

[Shadow Trader]

A VPS near the broker's server is standard advice, but the details get skipped. Distance to the broker's trade server matters more than distance to any generic hub. A VPS in the same data center as the broker can show 1 ms. One in the same city might show 15. One on another continent, 150 or more.

For a strategy with a 2 pip target, that difference is not theoretical. During fast moves, a delay of 100 ms means the price has already changed before the order lands.

A few simple checks help. Ping the broker's server address from the VPS, not from home. Run a trace route to spot detours. Then compare ping at different times of day, since the number at 3am tells nothing about the number at 8:30 New York time.

Also worth noting: ping isn't the full story. Order processing time on the broker side, the matching engine, and the platform bridge all add delay on top of network delay.

A cheap VPS with a decent location sometimes beats an expensive one far away.

One more detail: the route can change without notice. A provider may reroute traffic through a different carrier after maintenance, and the ping drifts from 2 ms to 9 ms overnight. Running a scheduled ping every few minutes and logging the result builds a baseline that makes such shifts obvious.

It also helps to test from the VPS with the same tool at the same time as a local machine, then compare. The gap between them is the actual benefit of the VPS, and sometimes it's far smaller than the sales page promised. Sometimes it turns out to be larger, especially if the home connection has hidden jitter.

What ping figures have been reached from a VPS to the trade server, and did it change the fill quality noticeably?