What Is Slippage? Definition, Causes and Real Data

Slippage is the difference between the price you expected when you sent an order and the price at which it was actually filled. It happens because the market moves in the interval between your terminal sending the request and the broker's server matching it. It can run against you or in your favour, but it is not symmetric in practice: the conditions that produce large slippage are the same conditions in which a precise fill matters most.

How it works

Slippage (pips) = (Fill price − Requested price) / Pip size
                  sign reversed for sell orders

Three things produce it.

Latency. Every millisecond between request and execution is time in which the price can change. Latency comes from the network path to the trade server, the terminal's own processing, and the broker's matching queue.

Liquidity. Your order is filled against the book. If the size available at the quoted price is smaller than your order, the remainder fills at the next level. This is why slippage grows with position size and shrinks with market depth.

Order type. Market orders fill at whatever price exists and therefore slip. Limit orders never slip, but they fail to fill, which is its own cost. Stop orders — including a stop loss — become market orders the moment they trigger, which is the single most important consequence: a stop guarantees your exit, not your exit price.

The worst conditions are predictable: scheduled economic releases, the thin window around the daily rollover, the Sunday open gap, and the moment a cluster of stops is triggered and drains the book. Positive slippage exists too — a fill better than requested — and a broker that passes it on while also passing on the negative is behaving symmetrically. One that keeps the good fills and gives you the bad ones is not.

Why it matters

Slippage is the gap between a strategy on paper and the same strategy on a server. A backtest run on historical bid prices with zero slippage assumes an execution model that does not exist, and the shorter the average trade, the larger the share of the edge that assumption invents.

The arithmetic is unforgiving at small targets. Half a pip of adverse slippage is a tenth of a five-pip target and a four-hundredth of a two-hundred-pip one, and it lands on top of spread and commission rather than instead of them.

What the data shows

Execution quality matters most to systems that fire without waiting for a convenient moment, and that is most of the platform. Across the public accounts on ShowMyTrades with trading history (August 2026), the median autotrading share is 99%, and 53.9% of accounts are more than 90% automated (42.2% are under 10%). Those accounts reach 703 distinct broker servers — the same strategy, sent to seven hundred different matching engines, with seven hundred different latency profiles.

Holding periods make the exposure worse. On those accounts the median trade lasts 2.4 hours and the median account has closed 171 trades: execution cost is charged often, and each trade has little time for price movement to absorb it.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

We do not record the price your terminal requested, so per-trade slippage is not a metric we publish, and no honest platform can publish it from broker data alone. What we do publish is the measurable half — the latency that produces it.

• The Terminal panel (Terminal & Open Charts on MT5) reports Ping, the round-trip time between the terminal and the broker's trade server, and Retransmission, the share of network packets that had to be sent again. Under 50 ms ping is excellent; above 200 ms can mean slower execution and more slippage. Consistently high retransmission points to an unreliable network or a distant trade server. The same panel shows Terminal build, Memory, Auto trading and DLL imports.
• The Closed Trades table under Trade History & Balance Progression carries Open Price and Close Price per ticket, next to the S/L and T/P columns. Comparing where an exit was set against where it actually landed is the closest reading of slippage available from broker records.
• Worst Trade (Pips) in Advanced Statistics is the fast check. A worst trade far deeper than the account's intended stop distance is the fingerprint of a gapped or slipped exit, not of a bad entry.

Common misunderstandings

1. A stop loss guarantees the exit, not the price. In a gap it fills at the first available price, which can be far beyond the level.
2. "Zero slippage" is not a promise anyone can keep on a market order. Guaranteed stops exist, but they are a separate product and they are paid for.
3. Slippage is not always a loss. Check whether your fills are ever better than requested; if they never are, that is information about the broker.
4. Demo results are optimistic. Demo servers do not model queue position or book depth, so a strategy that is flawless on demo can be marginal live.

For how ping, retransmission and the rest of the page fit together, read the guide to reading a trading account dashboard.

Related terms