Requote

What a requote is

You press buy at 1.10000. By the time the order reaches the broker's system, the best available price is 1.10020. Under some account types the system will not simply fill you there. It sends back a message: the price is now 1.10020, do you accept? That message is a requote.

It exists because the order asked for a specific price and the market moved. The system either fills at the new price, which is a form of slippage, or hands the choice back to the trader. A requote is the second case. The choice is a trade-off between a worse price and no trade.

When requotes happen

• Fast markets. Scheduled news, sudden moves and the open after a gap. The price changes faster than the order can travel.
• Slow connections. The longer the delay between your platform and the broker, the more the price can move in transit. A bot on a distant home connection sees more of them than one on a server near the broker. See forex VPS.
• Large orders. If the order is bigger than the quantity available at the quoted price, the average fill is worse.
• Execution type. Some accounts fill at the market whatever the price, which gives slippage and no requotes. Others offer a price and ask. Which one you have is stated in the account terms, and it varies.

The cost of a requote

Take a long trade with a take profit and a stop loss set a fixed distance from the price you intended. A fill that is r pips worse moves the entry up by r. The take profit is now r pips closer, and the stop loss r pips further. A win pays less and a loss costs more.

The formula is exact when the target and stop stay where they were. Every pip of requote subtracts one pip from the edge on every trade it touches, however large the target.

A worked example: the cost per trade

This is a made-up bot that wins 55.00000000000001 percent of the time. Its target and its stop are each 8 pips from the price it intended to get. Gross edge, with every order filled exactly as asked, is 0.55 x 8 - 0.44999999999999996 x 8 = +0.80 pips per trade. Now suppose each trade is requoted and the bot accepts the new price.

Calculated by us on 29 Oct 2026, exact for these made-up inputs. A 0.5 pip requote takes +0.80 down to +0.30. At 1 pip the edge is -0.20, which is negative: the bot now loses on average, with the same signals and the same win rate. The strategy did not change. The price it was filled at did. Accepting every requote is therefore not neutral for a bot with a small edge.

Accept, refuse or set a limit

Most platforms let an automated system set a maximum deviation, the number of points it will accept away from the requested price. Setting it to zero refuses any price change. A large value accepts almost anything. The choice moves the cost around:

• Tight limit. Fewer bad fills, more missed trades. If the missed trades are mostly the fast, profitable moves, the bot trades less and loses the best signals. If they are the worst fills, it was a good filter. A test cannot tell you which without live data.
• Loose limit. Almost every signal is traded, at whatever price the market gives. The edge per trade falls as in the table above.
• Retries. A bot that resends the order after a refusal can end up with a still worse price, or with two positions if the first one filled after all. A bot must check the account state before it resends.

How it hits bots

• Scalping EAs. A target of a few pips leaves no room for a requote of one pip. See expert advisors.
• News bots. They trade exactly when requotes are most likely, and the worst moments are the ones they were built for.
• Grid and martingale bots. The order that is refused is the one that was supposed to add to a ladder, or close a stack. A ladder with a missing rung is a different strategy from the one tested. See grid trading and martingale.
• Backtests. A backtest fills every order at the price it asked for. It contains no requotes, so live trading is almost always a little worse than the test.

How to check for requotes

• Search the bot's journal or log for requote and off-quotes messages and count them per hundred orders. Note the time of day for each.
• Compare the requested price with the fill price on every trade for a few weeks, and total the difference in pips. That total is your real cost per trade.
• Read the order execution policy of the account. It says whether orders are filled at the market or at the requested price.
• Run the same bot on a demo account and a small live account and compare the fill counts. A demo often fills everything. See demo account.
• Leave room in the target and stop for the usual requote size, not only for the spread.

What it does not tell you

A requote count does not say whether the broker is acting fairly. Requotes happen for the ordinary reason that prices move while orders travel. A high count may point to a slow connection or a fast market just as easily as to anything else. Treat it as a cost to measure and not as a story about intent.