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Spikes that exist on only one broker

A sharp wick on one platform and a clean candle on another. Both are the same pair, the same minute. Which one is real?

Possibly both, in their own way. A wick can appear when a single liquidity provider sends a bad quote, when the broker's aggregation briefly gives a wrong price, or when the feed hiccups. The broker's platform charts it. Stops get triggered. Then the price snaps back.

Other brokers with different providers or filters never show the wick.

Scalpers experience this as stops hit by "phantom" prices. The platform records the spike as a real tick, and the broker typically honours the fills. Disputes tend to go nowhere unless the spike is dramatically off-market.

Defending against it is hard. Wider stops reduce the risk but cost more when hit legitimately. Comparing live feeds from two brokers gives a way to check whether a spike was market-wide.

What fraction of the stop-outs in the last quarter happened on wicks that did not appear on a second broker's feed?

Fairman wrote: Spikes that exist on only one broker A sharp wick on one platform and a clean candle on another.

A wick on one broker and a clean candle elsewhere usually points to a single provider's bad quote. Comparing the tick history from a second feed quickly confirms whether the spike was real.