Show My Trades
Brokers· Glossary

What Is Order Execution? Types, Requotes and Fills

Order execution is how a broker turns your request into a filled trade. Market vs instant execution, requotes, partial fills, and how to measure quality.

Order execution is the process by which a broker turns an order request into a filled position at a specific price. It covers everything between your terminal sending the request and the server confirming a fill: routing, price validation, and the decision to accept, requote or reject. Two accounts running identical logic at different brokers can produce different results for this reason alone, with no difference in the strategy at all.

How it works

MetaTrader documents four execution modes — Request, Instant, Market and Exchange — but retail forex accounts run on two of them, and the difference between those two is what happens when the price moves while your request is in flight.

Market execution. The order fills at whatever price exists when it reaches the server. It cannot be rejected for price movement, so it effectively always fills — and it can slip.

Instant execution. You request a specific price. If the market has moved beyond the broker's tolerance, the server returns a requote: a new price you must accept or decline. No slippage, but no guarantee the trade opens at all.

Two further outcomes matter. A partial fill occurs when the size available at your price is smaller than your order, so part fills and the remainder either fills worse or is cancelled. A rejection returns an error code and no position.

The elapsed time decomposes cleanly:

Round-trip time = terminal -> trade server        (network path)
                + order validation and matching   (broker)
                + trade server -> terminal        (confirmation)

Only the middle term is the broker's execution speed. The first and third are network path, which is why moving a terminal onto a VPS near the trade server changes measured execution without the broker changing anything.

Why it matters

Execution is where a strategy stops being arithmetic. A backtest fills every order at the requested price, never gets requoted and never misses an entry. Live, each of those assumptions costs something, and the shorter the holding period the larger the share of the edge that execution decides rather than the signal.

Rejections are the under-counted half. Slippage at least shows up in the fill price, so it can be reasoned about after the fact. A trade that never opened leaves no record anywhere — and a strategy judged on the trades it managed to place is a survivorship-biased version of itself.

What the data shows

Across the public accounts on ShowMyTrades with trading history (August 2026), orders are sent to 703 distinct broker servers, and 15,436,464 trades have been read back from them. There is no single execution environment here: seven hundred independently configured servers stand between the same instruction and the same market.

Every one of those 15,436,464 records is a fill. None is an attempt — broker history reports positions that opened, so requotes, rejections and cancelled remainders are missing from the count by construction, on this platform and on every other one built from broker records.

Comparison is still possible, but only by repetition. 699 users run more than one account and 429 run accounts at more than one broker: holding the logic constant and varying the server is the nearest thing to a controlled execution test a retail trader has.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

  • The Terminal panel (Terminal & Open Charts on MT5) reports Ping, the round-trip time to the broker's trade server, and Retransmission, the share of network packets that had to be sent again. Under 50 ms is excellent; above 200 ms can mean slower order execution and more slippage. The same panel shows Terminal build, Memory, Auto trading and DLL imports.
  • The Closed Trades table under Trade History & Balance Progression carries Open Price, Close Price, S/L, T/P, Duration, Commission and Swap per ticket. Comparing where an exit was set against where it actually landed is the closest read on execution available from broker records.
  • Advanced Statistics shows Worst Trade (Pips) — an outlier far beyond the account's usual stop distance is the fingerprint of a gapped or badly filled exit rather than a bad entry — plus Avg. Trade Length, Total Commissions and Total Lots.
  • The Info row in the account header carries the broker badge with the trade server name in its tooltip, next to platform, currency and leverage. The server, not the brand, identifies the execution environment.

Common misunderstandings

  1. "Market execution is worse than instant." Neither is better. One buys price certainty at the cost of fill certainty; the other does the reverse. Which one hurts depends on the strategy.
  2. "ECN, STP and NDD describe execution." They are marketing labels, not regulated definitions, and they are not audited. Measure the account instead.
  3. "Slow fills are the broker's fault." Often the network path is. Check Ping before drawing a conclusion about the server.
  4. "Fast execution is good execution." Speed without price quality is worthless. An order filled instantly three pips away is still three pips away.

For a method to compare execution and cost between two brokers, see the broker cost audit guide.