New traders often assume that clicking buy or sell guarantees a fill at the exact price shown on screen. In live markets this is only sometimes true. Prices can move between the moment an order is sent and the moment it reaches the broker's server, and depending on the execution model in use, this gap can produce a requote, slippage, or in rare cases a rejected order.
Instant Execution vs Market Execution
Under instant execution, the broker attempts to fill your order at exactly the price you requested. If that price is no longer available by the time the order arrives, the broker sends back a requote — a new price for you to accept or decline. Under market execution, the order fills automatically at the best currently available price without asking first, which avoids requotes but means the fill price can differ from what you saw when you clicked.
Why Requotes Happen
Requotes are most common during fast-moving markets, particularly around major news releases, when prices update many times per second and liquidity providers withdraw or adjust quotes rapidly. A requote is not necessarily a sign of broker misconduct — it can simply reflect that the market moved faster than the round trip time of the order request. That said, an unusually high frequency of requotes, especially only on winning trades, is worth scrutinizing.
Many modern brokers default to market execution specifically to avoid requotes, accepting variable slippage instead. Which model is used is usually disclosed in the account terms and worth confirming before trading actively.
Slippage: Positive and Negative
Slippage is often assumed to always work against the trader, but it is symmetric by nature — a fast-moving market can just as easily fill an order at a better price than requested as a worse one. Negative slippage tends to draw more attention because it feels like a cost, while positive slippage often goes unnoticed, but over many trades the two can roughly offset unless there is a systematic execution problem.
Slippage around news events
During high-impact news releases, liquidity can thin out dramatically for a few seconds, causing slippage that is many times larger than normal. Stop orders and market orders placed right at release time are especially exposed. Traders who want to avoid this exposure often step aside from the market briefly around scheduled high-impact releases rather than holding orders through them.
Common Order Rejection Causes
- ▸Insufficient margin available to open or maintain the requested position size.
- ▸Market closed or in an auction period where standard order types are temporarily not accepted.
- ▸A stop-loss or take-profit level placed too close to the current price, violating the broker's minimum distance rule.
- ▸Connectivity issues between the trading terminal and the broker's server at the moment the order was sent.
How to Respond When Execution Goes Wrong
- 1.Check whether the event coincided with a scheduled high-impact news release or unusually thin liquidity period.
- 2.Review your own connection and platform logs before assuming the broker is at fault.
- 3.Keep a simple record of unusual execution events over time to spot patterns rather than reacting to a single incident.
- 4.Contact the broker's support with specific timestamps and order references if a pattern of unfavorable execution emerges.
The simplest way to reduce exposure to execution errors is to avoid placing new orders in the seconds around scheduled major news releases, when spreads widen and liquidity briefly disappears regardless of broker quality.