What it looks like when liquidity providers pull quotes
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2026 8:15 am
Prices on a screen suggest a market. During some releases that market is gone, and the screen just keeps drawing the last values it received. Liquidity providers widen, shrink the size they will show, or stop quoting for a second or two when they cannot price risk. Whatever is left is thin and jumpy.
On a retail platform this shows up in several ways: requotes, "off quotes" messages, fills that arrive far from the displayed price, rejected orders, or a price that seems frozen then leaps. Blaming the broker for all of it is not always fair, because the upstream market itself was hollow. How the broker handles it, whether through last look, widening, or passing the gap through, varies.
One measurable sign is tick rate. A major might normally deliver several ticks per second, and around a release that can fall to zero for a couple of seconds before returning in a burst. A simple script can timestamp every tick and flag gaps over a second and a half.
That flag is useful as a trading filter: if no tick has arrived within the last 1.5 seconds, do not send an order. It will not catch everything, but it stops the worst of the blind entries.
What tick rate does your platform show on a major in the last second before a release, and how long does it stay silent afterwards?
On a retail platform this shows up in several ways: requotes, "off quotes" messages, fills that arrive far from the displayed price, rejected orders, or a price that seems frozen then leaps. Blaming the broker for all of it is not always fair, because the upstream market itself was hollow. How the broker handles it, whether through last look, widening, or passing the gap through, varies.
One measurable sign is tick rate. A major might normally deliver several ticks per second, and around a release that can fall to zero for a couple of seconds before returning in a burst. A simple script can timestamp every tick and flag gaps over a second and a half.
That flag is useful as a trading filter: if no tick has arrived within the last 1.5 seconds, do not send an order. It will not catch everything, but it stops the worst of the blind entries.
What tick rate does your platform show on a major in the last second before a release, and how long does it stay silent afterwards?