What Is Server Latency? Ping, Retransmission, Slippage

Server latency is the time a message takes to travel from your trading terminal to the broker's trade server and back. MetaTrader reports it as ping, in milliseconds. It is a property of the route between two specific machines — not of your internet plan, and not of the broker alone.

How it works

Ping (ms) = terminal → trade server → terminal, one round trip

Two things dominate it: physical distance and the number of network hops in between. Bandwidth barely enters into it. Light covers roughly 200 km per millisecond through fibre, the return leg doubles that, and every router adds its own queueing delay. A 500 Mbit home line in Sydney reaching a London server will always lose to a 10 Mbit VPS in the same datacentre as the trade server.

Latency is charged twice per trade, in both directions. Prices reach your terminal late, so an Expert Advisor decides on a quote that has already aged; then the order takes the same trip back, so the market has moved again before the server sees it.

Retransmission measures something different and, when it is high, worse. TCP guarantees delivery by re-sending any packet that is lost or unacknowledged, and the retransmission figure is the share that had to be sent again. A lost packet does not cost you one extra hop, it costs a timeout — so retransmission does not raise your average delay smoothly, it injects spikes. An account with 40 ms ping and visible retransmission has a less predictable link than one sitting steadily at 90 ms, and the spikes land at random moments relative to your open positions.

Why it matters

Latency is the half of slippage you can actually measure. Every millisecond between decision and fill is time in which the price can move, and the direction it moves is not random when the market is trending or reacting to news.

The exposure scales with how often you trade, not with how much you make. A position held for three weeks does not notice 200 ms; a system opening several trades a day pays that gap on every entry and every exit.

The asymmetry is what hurts: a link degrades under the same load that makes the market move, so your slowest round trip and your fastest price tend to arrive together rather than independently.

What the data shows

Latency is billed per order, so what matters is how often an account trades and how thin its margin is. Across the public accounts on ShowMyTrades with trading history (August 2026), the median trade lasts 2.4 hours, the median account has closed 171 trades, and the median profit factor is 1.28. At that margin, execution quality is not a rounding error on the result — it is a component of it.

Those accounts reach 703 distinct broker servers across 15,436,464 synchronised trades: seven hundred matching engines in seven hundred buildings, each a different distance from wherever the terminal happens to be running. And 53.9% of accounts are more than 90% automated, which means most orders here are sent the instant a condition is met, by something that cannot decide to wait for a calmer moment.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

Almost no public track record says anything about the machine that produced it. On an Expert Advisor connection, ours does: the Terminal & Open Charts module publishes Ping to the trade server and Retransmission beside the terminal's build, memory and permissions, with a connection badge, the time since the terminal last reported, and how many of your terminals are online.

Both figures are the terminal's own measurement of the route it is genuinely using, not an estimate from your location, and the thresholds we read them against sit in the tooltips rather than in anyone's head: under 50 ms ping is excellent, above 200 ms can mean slower execution and more slippage, and retransmission close to 0% means a stable connection while consistently higher values point to an unreliable network or a distant trade server.

Two notes. A Direct Connection never touches your machine, so it reports none of this. And on MT4 the module is titled simply Terminal, because the MT4 EA does not send the chart list.

Common misunderstandings

• "Ping is my execution speed." Ping measures the network round trip and nothing else. The broker's own processing, its queue and any dealer intervention sit on top of that number and are invisible inside it.
• "Faster internet lowers it." An order is a few hundred bytes, so the width of the pipe is never the constraint. Its length is, which is why proximity to the trade server beats a bigger connection every time.
• "The average looks fine, so the link is fine." An average conceals spikes, and spikes are precisely what the retransmission figure is reporting. Orders are not sent at the average moment; they cluster where the market moves.
• "Connected means the terminal is alive." The flag is the last value the terminal reported, which on a machine switched off weeks ago still reads connected. Freshness decides — that is why the badge falls back to Offline when the data has gone stale.

For how latency reads next to every other number on an account page: how to read a trading account dashboard.

Related terms