Latency matters far less than people think, until it doesn't

Correct framing. Crowding, not speed, is the variable that decides whether latency shows up in your P&L.

Which explains why my slower strategy has better fills than my fast one. I always assumed it was luck!

Funding flips at the top of the hour is the perfect example. Everyone and their bot wants the same fill in the same second, and I'm sitting there with 10x on wondering why my "edge" evaporated. Spoiler: I was the liquidity.

I like the reframe from speed to competition, it takes some of the self-blame out of a bad fill. When I used to get filled worse than expected I'd spiral about my setup being broken. Do you find knowing you were just in a crowded queue makes it easier to let go of?

Worth adding that the same signal can be crowded or not depending on the timeframe you read it on. A 5m close above a level is a much more populated trigger than something you built from three conditions nobody else stacks the same way.

Small note on the maths: crowding shows up as a shift in your average fill, not as a wider distribution of them. So if you compare expected entry to actual entry over a few hundred trades and see a consistent bias in one direction, that's queue position, not bad luck. Random slippage averages out; competition doesn't.

MomoQueen that's the funniest part of all this. The reward for being slow is nobody fights you for the price. I place my orders and go make coffee.

Two things to check before blaming latency: 1. Does your backtest assume fill at signal price? If yes, any crowded entry is silently overstating results and you'll never see it in the equity curve. 2. Split your trade log by how "obvious" the trigger was (round number, session open, indicator cross) and compare realised slippage per bucket. That comparison tells you more than any ping test. And the usual warning, if you then optimise to avoid the crowded triggers, make sure you're not just fitting to the specific ones that happened to be busy in your sample.

queue position is everything on obvious triggers. scalped for years, the round numbers were always the worst. everyone stacked at .00 and you eat the whole spread getting out. betty's split by trigger obviousness is the right test. do that before you buy a faster line.

I spent about six months convinced my broker was picking on me. Bought a wired connection, moved my setup, the whole thing. Then I looked at the trades and every single bad fill was me buying a break of the prior day high at the open, which is roughly the least original idea in the world. The cable was fine. I was just late to a party everyone else got invited to too.