Why Latency Determines Your Fill Quality
When you click Buy in MetaTrader, that order travels from your VPS to your broker’s server. The round-trip time, measured in milliseconds, decides whether your order hits the order book before the market moves.
Every 10 ms of additional latency increases the probability of slippage. At 100 ms, you’re effectively trading behind the market on every tick.
| Latency | Experience | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| < 5 ms | Co-located. Orders hit before the chart updates. | Excellent |
| 5–15 ms | Same-city or adjacent datacenter. Imperceptible delay. | Great |
| 15–30 ms | Same continent, good routing. Slippage rare on liquid pairs. | Good |
| 50–70 ms | Cross-continent or suboptimal routing. Noticeable on news events. | Acceptable |
| > 100 ms | Poor routing or wrong datacenter. Avoid for serious trading. | Not recommended |
For most retail strategies (swing trading, daily timeframes, manual execution) anything under 30 ms is perfectly fine. But if you’re running a scalping EA, a prop firm challenge with tight drawdown limits, or a news-trading strategy, every millisecond counts.
Server Location Matters Just as Much as Hardware
It’s tempting to fixate on CPU cores and RAM. But a 16-core server in Singapore connected to a broker in London will lose to a 4-core server sitting in the same Equinix facility. Latency is the bottleneck that no amount of hardware can fix.
Think of it this way: a CPU cycle takes about 0.3 nanoseconds. A cross-continent network hop takes 50,000,000 nanoseconds. You can double your core count and gain maybe 5% execution speed. Or you can pick the right datacenter and gain 5,000%.
This is why we offer 9 datacenter locations across 4 continents. Trading infrastructure isn’t about “more GHz.” It’s about where the server sits.
Major Broker Server Locations
Most Forex and CFD brokers colocate their trade servers in a handful of major financial hubs. London dominates for Forex; New York for US equities and futures; Tokyo and Singapore serve APAC traders.
Here’s what we know from publicly available server metadata, broker documentation, and trader reports:
| Broker | Primary Server Location | Recommended Our Region |
|---|---|---|
| IC Markets | London (LD4), New York (NY4) | United Kingdom / US East |
| Pepperstone | London (LD4), New York (NY4) | United Kingdom / US East |
| FTMO (prop firm) | London (LD4), Frankfurt | United Kingdom / EU (Germany) |
| Eightcap | London (LD4) | United Kingdom |
| ThinkMarkets | London (LD4) | United Kingdom |
| FP Markets | London (LD4), New York (NY4) | United Kingdom / US East |
| OANDA | New York, London | US East / United Kingdom |
| Interactive Brokers | New York (Chicago/NY), London | US East / United Kingdom |
| Dukascopy | Geneva (Switzerland) | EU (Germany) |
| IG Markets | London (LD4) | United Kingdom |
| FXCM | London (LD4), New York | United Kingdom / US East |
| XM | London, Cyprus | United Kingdom / EU (Germany) |
| Exness | London (LD4), Frankfurt, Singapore | UK / EU / Singapore |
| FundedNext (prop firm) | London (LD4), Singapore | United Kingdom / Singapore |
If your broker isn’t listed, reach out to our support team. We can help you identify the best location based on your specific setup.