Mt4 trade copy speed
The default speed of a remote trade copier and the local trade copier to synchronize data between master account and slave account is 400ms. It means that the speed of the trade copier is 400 milliseconds and it can be reduced to 200ms or even 100ms (For LTC VIP only). And just to straight the facts, most trade copiers work that way, not only the mtprogramming.com trade copiers.
The fact that the trade copier can copy the data in 400 milliseconds doesn’t mean that the slave account can receive in that speed, most broker server are the bottleneck that causes delays when modifying \ opening \ closing trades. Most of the time it works without any problems but sometimes the broker server can cause 1 second delay, I saw cases which broker server caused 2-5 seconds delay which you know can be devastating when it comes to trading. I will tell you to hard cold facts, there is nothing you can do about it, the only thing to do is find a reliable broker.
Watch this video below to see how I test the speed of execution between multiple MetaTrader 4 demo accounts on different Forex brokers. I use Local Trade Copier on 6x MT4 client terminals from SGT Markets, Pepperstone, Alpari UK, Forex.com, Forex Capital Markets and FXDD.
Notice that i have the best possible price feed on SGT MetaTrader account from The Palladia Group (currency pair names with the .tpg suffix).
For the record the server delays on Demo accounts are far more frequent than on real money accounts, but the problem of delays still exist in both of them.
As you may know different brokers have different price feeds, spreads, slippages, minimum distance values (StopLevel). So if you copy market orders between different accounts you should expect different open prices. This is very important when you copy trades that are produced by scalping EA. The trade can be copied in under a second while the open price is still the same, but the other broker may have the market price lets say higher by 1 pip and that could have a huge impact for your profit on the slave account. The same can occur if the spread on the master account is 2.5 pips while it is 3.8 pips on the slave account. This means you will not get the same profit/loss from the copied trades like on the master account.
In the picture above you can see different prices between two Forex brokers. These are demo account, but this can be seen on real account as well. The difference is only 0.5 pip (half pip) in this example and that is very low value if you aim for the bigger take profit, but if you use scalping EA that has take profit of 1 pip it is obviously that you will not be satisfied with the entry price that is higher by 0.5 pip for the BUY trade or 0.5 pip lower for the SELL trade. You can notice that the spread is different as well. One broker has 2.0 pip spread while the other one has 0.9 pip spread. Of course the spread is not fixed and it changes on every price tick.
LTC and RTC have special setting named Max Price Deviation Pips. This setting allows you to set how many pips your current market (entry) price can be away from original trade entry price. Best to leave this setting as is which is 10 pips. If you change it, please note that your trades may not be executed because of the different price feeds, spreads, stop and freeze levels among different brokers and account types. Client EA shows “Delayed” trade count so you can see how many trades are delayed because of the price being too far from the entry. Please do not panic if you did not get some of the trades, maybe they are delayed. If MaxPriceDeviationPips=10, EA will allow 10 pips price deviation. If you set this variable to a negative number your EA will wait for the better entry. Example if you set value to -3 pips, EA will wait until your broker market price will reach better entry by 3 pips and only then open the trade.
Furthermore, the LTC v1.5 and the RTC v1.7 Client EA has special dashboard icon that will show if your broker delays trading actions so you cloud notice this on time.