The quality of the market entries can depend on many factors, including internal (actions of the trader) and external (actions of the broker, communication channels). They are tightly connected and it is difficult to say which ones are more important. Stay effective on the internal segment, and the external one will come up!
For example, one of the most important factors is the local speed of the trading terminal, which is essentially an “access window” to transactions associated with your account on the broker's server. The cleaner and more accurate this "window" is, the more accurate and faster the broker will work for you. There are no trivia in the trading.
Pay attention to the traffic indicator at the bottom right of the terminal.
If this indicator shows a constant, continuous increase (growth) in fairly large amounts (plus or minus 10 kilobytes per minute do not require the attention of course). For example, 200-2000 kilobytes per minute, it is worth checking the terminal performance. More correctly, its current processes, what is it doing?
- This happens when you install a new terminal and it downloads the quote archive in the first 5-10 minutes (sometimes it can even be up to 26MB). At this moment the speed of execution of your orders is seriously affected.
- Traffic growth is possible when the terminal was not started, for example, for a week or even more.
- Probably your broker gives a lot of ticks and all pairs are included in your market review. The terminal spends additional energy and additionally downloads the communication channel.
- If you have many exotic pairs open, at the moment of the release of important events the number of ticks increases significantly, which can cause serious problems with the execution of orders: even if the connection speed is high, during the transfer of the order, a “traffic jam” is obtained from requests and received quote packages. In addition, it's not for nothing that brokers reduce the number of ticks per second and do not pass all quotes, probably this greatly worsens the terminal performance.
You need to take into account not only the workload of your machine which the MetaTrader terminal is running on, but also take into account the workload of the server which the terminal is connected to (ie where MetaTrader sends its requests).
Traders “woke up” and they all went to trade - in this case the server will respond to your requests longer.
At the time of publication of any important news, even those traders who have zero balance will sit at the terminals and they are “ordinary spectators on the fence”. In this case, the signals processing speed will be even slower.
Even if we assume that everything is optimized on the server and there is a certain multithreaded service queue, it is rather difficult to take into account all factors (presence of VIP clients, “black list” of clients, competitors, hackers, etc...). Therefore, errors are calculated for any measurement. As well, for more scrupulous and picky testers, each output is evaluated with a certain probability and deviation.
This topic can go on and on and on. Everything depends on the goals, selected criteria, availability of free time and resources.
Of course, this is not the only factor affecting your effectiveness. If you want to know more information on this topic, we can strongly recommend you to read the second module of free training of our school of traders, namely its second block “Improving efficiency”. It touches upon the work of VPS, additional factors in the trading terminal efficiency, important advice to traders to improve their level of trading approach and tools.