With EURJPY going crazy yesterday, I didn’t know what I was going to wake up to. With Forex you can make money, but you can lose money. And, even when you have hopes of making money are realistic and a bot is in control, you have to be pretty tough to tolerate the bumps along the way.

Last night, The Fed closed all of the EURJPY trades. I am grateful to have them closed and to be positive. Many in the community are complaining about “slippage”. An example is the first few trades in the above graphic. The trades were all supposed to close at “168.481”, but they didn’t close until “168.496.” To the uninformed person, we say, “Glad it closed okay.” To the informed investor, we yell, “Slippage” and blame the broker. In many cases, this is OX Securities.

Slippage occurs when the broker fails to execute the trades as quickly as requested. This may not mean losing money, but it definitely means we didn’t make as much as we would have liked. Clearly, the broker’s servers were overwhelmed when the “TP” price was hit. I am not making excuses, but it shows some flaws in some of the key things the farm relies on.

In the EURJPY trades, the blue indicates trades that had NO slippage. Of the 22 trades the bot managed, 8 closed with some slippage. These 8 all took a bite out of my profit.

Today, my Pro FX bot also closed some trades. It wanted all of these trades to close at 0.85843. Fortunately, all open trades closed at 0.85844. The green on the “TP” price is likely a clear indicator of no/minimal slippage on these trades.

Bottom Line: As a US algo investor, we have limited options in brokers. This won’t change until OX upgrades or gets competition. 🙁