vps latency to broker, does 1ms vs 50ms actually change anything for retail

[Dean]

forex vps providers brag about 1ms latency to the broker like its life or death. for a retail trader, not an HFT shop, does the difference between 1ms and 50ms actually change my fills in any way i'd notice, or is it pure marketing for people who dont scalp tick charts?

[bluedreams]

for the vast majority of retail styles, 1ms vs 50ms is marketing. on swing and even most intraday, a 50ms round trip is invisible against the seconds you spend deciding. where it starts to matter is high-frequency scalping on news where price moves multiple pips in the time your order travels. if youre not doing that, dont pay a premium chasing single-digit milliseconds.

[realtommy]

this matches my experience. what actually hurts retail fills isnt your 50ms, its broker-side execution speed and slippage policy. a broker that requotes or delays on their end will wreck you on a 1ms vps just the same. fix the broker before obsessing over the millisecond on your side.

[Daniel]

retail traders paying for 1ms latency to manually click buttons is the funniest part of this whole industry. you have a 250ms reaction time. your bottleneck is your own nervous system, not the cable.

[Chris]

the troll exaggerates for manual traders but undersells it for automated scalpers, where the EA reacts in microseconds and the network genuinely is the bottleneck. so the answer is entirely strategy-dependent: manual or swing, latency is noise, automated high-frequency, latency is signal. buy the latency that your actual strategy can use, no more.

[andrew.james]

how would i even measure my real latency to the broker rather than just trusting the vps providers number?

[william_h]

mt5 shows ping to the trade server in the connection status at the bottom right. thats your real round trip from that machine. run it on your home pc and on a trial vps and compare. the providers headline 1ms is to their own gateway, not necessarily to your specific brokers server, so always measure the actual ping that matters to you.

[Ryan]

measured exactly this once: home fibre gave me about 40ms to the broker, a regional vps gave 3ms. on my swing entries the fill difference was statistically nothing over hundreds of trades. on a scalping EA i tested, the 3ms version had measurably fewer slipped entries. same conclusion, latency value scales with how fast your strategy acts.

[Maverick]

the takeaway for the original question: dont pay the latency premium unless your strategy reacts faster than a human. measure your ping, look at whether your fills actually suffer, and let evidence rather than the providers brochure set your spend.

[westcoastjay]

plot twist, the people who most need low latency are the ones who least know they have an edge worth protecting. the ones buying it for a moving-average crossover are decorating.

[Elliot]

measure ping, decide by strategy speed. solid.

[aaronm]

checked my mt5 ping after reading this and im at 6ms on my current vps without ever optimizing for it was about to 'upgrade' for nothing. this thread saved me a pointless monthly bill.

[mattlive]

good outcome. 6ms is already well past the point of diminishing returns for anything but serious automated scalping. spend your energy on the strategy and broker quality, the latency box is already ticked for you.