Execution Speed: What Milliseconds Mean for Your Case — India
The same figure is decisive for one way of holding positions and irrelevant for another. This page is about telling which of the two describes you, and the measured round-trips below are what the comparison is made against.
Open Exness Account →Whether a difference of tens of milliseconds matters at all is decided by how a position is held, not by the figure itself. A position kept open for hours travels far enough between its own opening and closing that any difference in fill timing disappears inside that movement. A position opened and closed within seconds has no such movement to absorb it, and the same difference sits directly in the result. Which of the two cases applies is readable from a trader's own account history: the holding time of the positions and how large their results usually are.
Why this is measured with trades
Execution quality is one of the account features Exness highlights, and it cannot be judged from quotes alone — only a real order shows the latency, the fill price and whether the platform rejects size. The probe opens and immediately closes positions of increasing size and records what actually happened.
Execution speed and fill quality vary with market conditions, liquidity and position size.
Measured round-trips by instrument and size
| Instrument | Lot size | Avg execution | Slowest fill | Avg slippage (signed) | Better / zero / worse fills | Rejects |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EUR/USD | 0.01 | 151 ms | 187 ms | -0.3 pts | 1 / 2 / 0 | 0 |
| EUR/USD | 0.1 | 151 ms | 172 ms | -0.3 pts | 1 / 2 / 0 | 0 |
| EUR/USD | 1 | 146 ms | 172 ms | -0.3 pts | 1 / 2 / 0 | 0 |
| GBP/USD | 0.01 | 141 ms | 156 ms | +0.7 pts | 0 / 1 / 2 | 0 |
| GBP/USD | 0.1 | 130 ms | 140 ms | +0.0 pts | 0 / 3 / 0 | 0 |
| GBP/USD | 1 | 135 ms | 156 ms | +0.3 pts | 0 / 2 / 1 | 0 |
| XAU/USD (Gold) | 0.01 | 141 ms | 172 ms | +0.0 pts | 0 / 3 / 0 | 0 |
| XAU/USD (Gold) | 0.1 | 151 ms | 172 ms | +80.0 pts | 1 / 1 / 1 | 0 |
| XAU/USD (Gold) | 1 | 130 ms | 141 ms | -72.3 pts | 2 / 1 / 0 | 0 |
Across 27 measured round-trips the average fill took 130–151 ms depending on instrument and size, with 0 rejected orders in total. Negative slippage means the fill was better than the quoted price at the moment the order was sent.
Slippage in points, signed: negative = filled better than quoted, positive = worse. ‘Rejects’ counts orders the platform refused at that size.
How this was measured
- Real market orders (buy, then immediate close) placed in an Exness MetaTrader 5 terminal.
- Latency timed in-terminal from order send to broker confirmation.
- Sizes stepped 0.01 → 1.00 lot to expose size-dependent slippage.
- Fills depend on market liquidity, account and conditions, and can differ.
Measured in-terminal on Exness’s own MetaTrader 5 pricing feed and symbol specifications, refreshed on a schedule. All figures are indicative and change with market conditions.
Open Exness Account →Two cases, one number
The figure that describes fill timing is the same for everyone using the platform. What differs from one trader to the next is what it gets compared against: the distance a position covers between being opened and being closed.
When that distance is large — positions held through a session or longer — a difference of milliseconds is a rounding error inside it. Nothing about the timing shows up in the result, because the result is made of something else entirely.
When the distance is small — positions opened and closed inside a short window, aiming at a move of a few points — the same difference is a visible share of the result. It is also present in every position rather than occasionally, which is what makes it decisive here and irrelevant in the other case.
Where the boundary between the two sits
There is no universal threshold, because the boundary is a ratio rather than a time. It sits wherever the usual result of a position stops being large compared with the movement that can happen while an order is being filled.
This is why two traders can read the same page and reach opposite conclusions while both are right about themselves. The number they read is one number; the comparison each of them makes is their own.
The ratio also moves with the instrument. The same holding time covers a different distance on an instrument that moves quickly than on one that does not, so a trader whose positions sit on both kinds is in both cases at once, on different rows of the same history.
Checking which of the two cases you are in
- Take the holding time of the positions in the account history: the interval between opening and closing, position by position.
- Take the usual result of those positions in points, separately for each instrument, since points are not comparable across instruments.
- Compare that result with how far the instrument can move in the fraction of a second an order takes to fill — if the result is many times larger, timing is not what decides it.
- Repeat the comparison on the shortest-held positions rather than on the average, because the average hides exactly the rows the question is about.
- Count how often those short-held positions occur: a case that applies to one row in fifty is a different matter from one that applies to every row.
The comparison is a ratio between a trader's own figures. It is not a threshold that holds for everyone, and it changes when the way of holding positions changes.
When fill timing is visible in the result and when it is not
| How the position is held | What its result is compared against | Where fill timing sits in it |
|---|---|---|
| Opened and closed within seconds | A target measured in a few points | A share of the result, present in every position |
| Held for minutes | A move of tens of points | Visible on the quickest instruments, marginal on the rest |
| Held through a session | A move of hundreds of points | Below the resolution of the result |
| Held overnight or longer | A move that includes the gap between sessions | Not distinguishable at all |
| Entered at a set level rather than at market | The level itself | A different question: whether the level was reached, not when the order arrived |
The rows describe how a result is composed. None of them says which way of holding a position is preferable.