Positive slippage faded out and nobody announced it
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2026 9:51 pm
Positive slippage faded out and nobody announced it
For a while, fills landed slightly better than requested every so often. Then the better fills stopped. Only the worse ones remained.
On a clean feed, slippage should be roughly symmetric over a few hundred trades. When one side vanishes, something changed: a new liquidity provider, a different price improvement rule, or rounding that now favours the house.
No email goes out about it. The only evidence is in a log with requested price, filled price, and the sign of the difference.
Healthy accounts tend to show close to an even split. Sour ones lean heavily one way, and that lean is a better health check on a broker than anything on its marketing page.
One more clue worth watching: the size of the improvement. Some brokers keep positive slippage alive but cap it at a tiny fraction of a pip while letting negative slippage run to a full pip or more. The counts look even, the money does not.
So the log should hold two things, the count split and the average pips on each side. A fifty-fifty count with an average gain of 0.1 against an average loss of 0.6 is not symmetric at all.
Sometimes the change traces back to something mundane, like a new liquidity provider added to the pool or a switch in the way the platform rounds fills. Asking support for a plain statement of the broker's price improvement policy is reasonable, and the answer, or the avoidance of one, is informative in itself.
What does the split look like across the last hundred fills?
For a while, fills landed slightly better than requested every so often. Then the better fills stopped. Only the worse ones remained.
On a clean feed, slippage should be roughly symmetric over a few hundred trades. When one side vanishes, something changed: a new liquidity provider, a different price improvement rule, or rounding that now favours the house.
No email goes out about it. The only evidence is in a log with requested price, filled price, and the sign of the difference.
Healthy accounts tend to show close to an even split. Sour ones lean heavily one way, and that lean is a better health check on a broker than anything on its marketing page.
One more clue worth watching: the size of the improvement. Some brokers keep positive slippage alive but cap it at a tiny fraction of a pip while letting negative slippage run to a full pip or more. The counts look even, the money does not.
So the log should hold two things, the count split and the average pips on each side. A fifty-fifty count with an average gain of 0.1 against an average loss of 0.6 is not symmetric at all.
Sometimes the change traces back to something mundane, like a new liquidity provider added to the pool or a switch in the way the platform rounds fills. Asking support for a plain statement of the broker's price improvement policy is reasonable, and the answer, or the avoidance of one, is informative in itself.
What does the split look like across the last hundred fills?