MT4 Trade Copier Speed Test on 6 Different Forex Brokers

By default the Local Trade Copier software synchronize trades between master and client accounts every 400 ms. But it can even be faster if reducing synchronization rate to 100 ms or even lower.

However this does not mean that your trading action can be repeated (trade open/modify/close) on the slave account in 400 ms or less every time. The trade copier speed usually depends on the broker and in most cases its the broker server that causes the delays to open/modify/close trades.

Usually broker responds immediately and the trading action on the slave account is performed instantly, but often broker server delay can be 1 second or even more. Personally I have seen some brokers with the delay of 2-5 seconds on almost every single trade.

This is the main reason your trades can be delayed. Believe it or not, but there are brokers that give 60-90 second delay to open trade on a demo account and that is “applied” the 1 of the 10 trades. In other words the trade copy speed depends on the broker server delay 99% of the time and there is nothing we can do about it. That is why it is important to have very 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 (currency pair names with the .tpg suffix).

I must admit that SGT Markets in this test had the fastest execution. It is important to understand that trade copier speed depends on the broker execution and the quality of Internet connection (latency). But because LTC was able to copy the trades in 62 milliseconds I must say that Local Trade Copier is probably the fastest trade copier available.

Broker server delays on demo accounts are more frequent than on the real accounts, but still exists and that is the main problem for the trade copying delay.

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.

 

You might also want to watch this video of another trade copier speed test I did recently. After watching this video you will see that the Local Trade Copier is one of the fastest trade copiers available to Forex traders.