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Slippage During News: Is It the Route or the Broker?

News slippage is real and it has two distinct causes. One you can fix with a better route. The other is determined by your broker's execution model - and no routing change touches it.

TL;DR

Your order spends time in transit between your machine and the broker's server. The longer that transit takes, the more price moves before the broker sees your order. That is the network contribution to slippage. The broker's execution model, spread policy, and liquidity provider relationships determine the rest. A faster route reduces the network component but cannot eliminate slippage caused by market volatility or broker execution design.

See the plansRead the slippage guide
Network part
Price moves during your order's transit time. Faster route = less exposure.
Broker part
Execution model, spread policy, and LP relationships during volatile moments.
Market part
News releases with no liquidity gap the spread regardless of your setup.

What's actually happening

When you place a market order, your platform sends it to the broker's server. The time that order takes to travel - your round-trip latency - is time during which the market is still moving. If NFP just printed and EURUSD is moving 30 pips in 2 seconds, 200 ms of round-trip time corresponds to 3 pips of potential slippage from network alone.

Add to that the broker's execution processing time and any queue depth at their server during peak load, and your total slippage exposure grows.

This is why brokers who advertise "no slippage" accounts are technically accurate in some conditions: if the broker always fills at your requested price regardless of where the market moved, slippage is zero but the spread is wider to compensate. Different execution models trade one form of cost for another.

Quick self-diagnosis - 5 minutes

  1. Measure your round-trip time to the broker
    Run ping your-broker-hostname.com. Your RTT in milliseconds is the minimum time your order spends in transit. Every ms above 0 is potential slippage exposure during fast-moving events.
  2. Record your actual slippage per trade
    Export your trade history from MT4/MT5. Compare requested price to filled price on news trades. Calculate average slippage in pips. If it's consistent regardless of market speed, it may be broker spread policy, not latency.
  3. Compare non-news vs news slippage
    If your slippage is near-zero in quiet markets but spikes to 3–10 pips during NFP, network latency is contributing - fast-moving markets amplify the cost of every extra millisecond of transit time.
  4. Test the same setup from a mobile hotspot
    If slippage on mobile is noticeably better or worse than your main connection during comparable news events, it confirms that routing is contributing to the outcome.
  5. Check broker execution model documentation
    Market execution accounts fill at the current market price - slippage possible. Instant execution accounts may requote instead. Know which you have before attributing all slippage to routing.

What actually fixes this - honest ranking

1

Ethernet over Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi jitter adds unpredictable latency to your order's transit time. Wired connections are more consistent. This is the free, immediate improvement that reduces your latency floor before anything else.

2

TradersProxy - shorter route to the broker's DC

Reducing your round-trip to the broker directly reduces how much price can move during your order's transit. Less time in transit = less slippage exposure from the network component. The broker's execution behavior remains unchanged.

3

VPS near the broker's DC (for EAs)

If you run automated news-trading EAs, co-locating near the broker's server achieves sub-5 ms RTT - the network slippage contribution approaches zero. For discretionary traders, this is complex overkill unless you are trading sub-second strategies.

4

Change broker (if execution model is the problem)

If your slippage is consistently bad even with low latency, your broker's execution model or LP relationships are the cause - not your network. No routing change fixes that. Different brokers have genuinely different execution quality during news events.

If the route is the problem, a dedicated trading proxy is the fix at the infrastructure level — a relay node co-located near your broker's datacenter replaces the unstable public internet hops with a dedicated path. 7-day trial on Starter →

When it's not a network problem

  • Market gaps at news release. When a number prints and liquidity gaps by 50 pips instantaneously, your order fills wherever the first available liquidity is. No network speed change fills the gap - it doesn't exist at intermediate prices.
  • Broker spread widening policy. Many brokers widen spreads around major news. That widening is applied on the broker side before your order is even processed. Routing cannot undo spread widening.
  • Insufficient account type. Some brokers offer ECN accounts with tighter spreads and better execution during news. If you're on a standard or demo account model, a broker account upgrade may improve execution more than any routing change.
  • Wrong instrument for news trading. Some currency pairs have deep liquidity and tight spreads during news. Others are illiquid and slippage is structurally high. Instrument selection affects outcome more than routing in some cases.
FAQ

Two things. First, your network latency adds time between when you click and when the broker receives the order - the price moves during that gap. Second, the broker's execution model: market execution brokers fill at the current market price, which may have moved significantly by the time your order arrives during a news spike.

Partly. The broker controls the execution model, the spread policy during news, and their own server processing speed. But the time your order takes to reach the broker's server is your network's contribution. Both matter. Reducing your network latency reduces your exposure to price movement during the transit time.

No - but it reduces it. If your order reaches the broker 150 ms faster, the price has moved less by the time the broker sees it. During a fast news move of 50 pips per second, 150 ms equals 7.5 pips less exposure. Routing helps but cannot eliminate slippage caused by market volatility or the broker's own execution delays.

That is a strategy question only you can answer. What you can say: the higher your round-trip time to the broker, the more price movement occurs before your order is confirmed. For scalpers entering on the news spike, latency is a material factor. For swing traders with wider stops, 100 ms of extra latency is rarely the margin of outcome.

Slippage means your order filled at a different (usually worse) price than requested. A requote means the broker rejected your order at the requested price and offered a new price. Slippage can be positive or negative. Requotes are always a friction event.