slippage on major news events - what's normal vs what's broker cheating

[Jake]

had a 15 pip slippage on nfp last friday on a market order. broker says it's normal market conditions. maybe true, maybe not. trying to figure out where the line is between unavoidable slippage during genuine volatility and a broker deliberately worsening fills.

i know slippage is real, especially at news. but some posts i've read suggest certain broker types will systematically fill you worse than the actual market moved. how do you tell the difference and is there any way to document it?

[darkhorizon]

15 pips on nfp market order is not outrageous, genuinely can happen. what matters is whether the slippage is consistently negative for you or random. legitimate slippage is bidirectional - sometimes you get filled better than requested, sometimes worse. if you're always getting filled worse, that's a pattern worth investigating. keep a spreadsheet of your fills vs market mid at time of order.

[Ryan]

market makers can and do widen spreads and sometimes reject or reprice orders during news. that's technically legal. actual price manipulation of fills is harder to prove but documented by some brokers historically. the clearest signal is comparing your fills to published interbank data or checking multiple platforms at the same instant. if you're on mt5 with a market maker, use limit orders around news if execution quality matters that much.

[richardlee]

does switching to an ecn broker fully solve this or do ecn brokers also have slippage on news?

[Jason]

ecn brokers absolutely have slippage on news. they're passing your order to actual market liquidity which thins out drastically in the second before and after a big number. the difference is the slippage should be more random and bidirectional rather than systematically against you. spreads can go 50-100 pips wide on ecn during high-impact releases too.

[Nathaniel]

if you're trading market orders on nfp you deserve the slippage. use limits or don't trade news. this isn't a broker problem it's a strategy problem.

[realtommy]

tracked 6 months of fills on two brokers side by side. broker A (market maker) slippage was -2.1 pips average on news, broker B (ecn) was -0.8 pips average. neither is cheating but the difference adds up. switched most news trades to the ecn account and it made a noticeable difference on the month.

[Ian]

track fills. compare. switch if pattern is consistently bad. not complicated.