Persistent Patterns in Ray's Spread Betting Live Test

Another day dawns, and all four of Ray Robot's MetaTrader spread betting accounts have suffered another small loss overnight. Another cable short, another -10.0 pips, Ray's bottom line down to £246.00 at both GKFX and Alpari UK.  This "false breakout" was however longer lasting than the previous ones.  It took 3 hours and 21 minutes on both GKFX and Alpari for Ray's (overly tight?) stops to get taken out this morning.

Since yesterday's initial report our logs have revealed many more apparently delayed quotes from both GKFX and Alpari. Sticking with just the live accounts for the moment, here's an extract from Alpari's log this morning:

Delayed quotes overnight on November 16/17th 2011 from Alpari UK's spread bet feed.

Alpari's worst case delay was 82 seconds at 14:57:12 yesterday afternoon. Now lets have a look at the competition:

Delayed quotes overnight on November 16/17th 2011 from GKFX's spread bet feed.

GKFX's worst case delay was 40 seconds at 07:50:04 this morning.  Since these long delays occur at different times on different brokers it doesn't seem as though they could be caused by a problem with the internet connection to our VPS, does it? Just for the record the ping time from our virtual private server to Alpari's servers averages 1 millisecond, whereas for GKFX's server it averages 2 milliseconds.

Whatever the ultimate cause, can you imagine the effect such delays might have if you were trading manually at the time? A member of the Trading Gurus community tried that thought experiment recently, and here is their conclusion:

I wouldn't be able to get the results I was expecting. The delay means the price would have already changed.