The cost you never see
Two traders take the same signal, on the same instrument, at the same second. One is filled at the price they clicked. The other is filled two points worse, waits 400 milliseconds longer, and pays a spread that widened just as the order went in.
Their journals will show two different results, and neither journal will explain why. The P&L column records what happened after the fill. Everything that happened at the fill is gone.
Over one trade this is noise. Over a thousand trades — the working year of an active intraday trader — a consistent two points against you is a fixed tax on every position, paid regardless of whether your analysis was right.
Why a statement cannot show it
This is the part worth being precise about, because it is where most tools quietly overclaim.
Execution quality is a comparison between the price you asked for and the price you received. Your exported statement contains only the second one. There is no column for the requested price, because by the time a trade is closed and exported, the request is history the terminal did not keep.
The same applies to:
- Latency — how long the round trip to the broker took. Not in any file.
- Spread at the moment of execution. The file has your fill price, not the other side of the book at that instant.
- Requotes — how often the broker came back with a different price instead of filling.
- How far the trade ran against you before it worked. A trade that closed +40 after sitting at −95 is a different trade from one that went straight to +40, and the statement shows both as +40.
Everything in this section therefore comes from a live connection to the terminal, which records both sides of each execution as it happens. Our own file-based analyzers — the ones you can use without an account — cannot see any of it, and say so.
What this section covers
Three pages, each on a cost that does not appear in a profit column:
Slippage — what it is, what it costs at a realistic frequency, and why "my broker has no slippage" almost always means nobody measured it.
MAE and MFE — how far a position went against you before it came good, and how much of the available move you actually captured. The two numbers that turn "I was right" into "I was right and I collected a third of it".
What your statement hides — a full inventory of what is missing from every export, so you can judge any journal, ours included, by what it is honestly able to measure.
Why this matters more for some traders than others
If you hold positions for days, execution costs are a rounding error against the size of the move you are trading. Two points on a four-hundred-point swing changes nothing.
If you scalp, execution is the strategy. At a ten-point target, two points of slippage is twenty percent of the trade, and a broker whose fills are consistently worse can turn a genuinely profitable method into a losing one without a single bad decision on your part. That is why this section exists at all: it is the difference between blaming yourself and finding the actual leak.