A short story about two brokers and one volatile bar

[Fairman]

A short story about two brokers and one volatile bar

Two traders compared notes after a wild bar on EURUSD. One had a stop at 1.0842, the other at 1.0842 as well. One was stopped out. The other was not.

Both looked at their charts. The first showed a low of 1.0840 in the bar. The second showed a low of 1.0843. Same minute. Same pair.

The difference was a single tick. One broker's feed had received a bad quote from a liquidity provider for a few hundred milliseconds. The other had filtered it out.

The trader stopped out lost four pips and was angry about it. The other had never even seen the move. Neither could prove anything, since both feeds were technically valid representations of what their broker had received.

The lesson is uncomfortable. The price a trader sees is not the price. It is one broker's version, made of choices about aggregation, filtering, and delay.

Strategies tuned to the micro-structure of one feed can fail on another. Anyone planning to move to a different broker should expect to retune and retest.

Has a stop ever been hit on one broker's feed while another's feed missed the move completely?