Execution quality audit for EA sellers: publish spread and slippage before buyers ask
ConfirmedTrades team · 24 June 2026 · 7 min read
Buyers of scalping and news EAs ask what spread and slippage the record paid. How the Execution panel measures both in points, and how to present the numbers.
Why your EA's costs are the buyer's first question
An execution quality audit is the part of due diligence where an experienced buyer decides whether your Expert Advisor's result belongs to the strategy or to your broker. If your average winner is 4 pips and your record was built on a raw-spread account with 0.2-pip spreads and clean fills, the buyer on a standard account paying 1.5 pips is not buying your EA. They are buying a slower version of it that loses.
Most EA vendors never publish execution data, so buyers guess, and they guess against you. Publishing the numbers yourself, from a source you cannot edit, turns the question into an answer.
What the Execution panel actually measures
The Execution quality section on your account page is built from two feeds. Spread is sampled live by the connector every few seconds for the symbols the account trades and stored as a histogram, both intraday and daily. Slippage comes from the trade history: on MetaTrader 5 for both the open and close of every deal, on MetaTrader 4 for stop-loss and take-profit closes. Both are shown per symbol, in points, with the symbol's digit count so readers can convert. On a 5-digit EURUSD quote, 12 points is 1.2 pips.
Points rather than dollars is deliberate. A $300 account and a $30,000 account running the same forex robot at the same broker should show the same execution profile, and they do in points. Dollar cost only appears in the headline lumps. Commission and swap live in the trade history table as Comm. and Swap columns when you expose them, and they are already inside the net profit that gain, drawdown and the Score use.
Run the audit on yourself first
Before a buyer does it, do it. Open the Execution panel, pick the most-traded symbol (the picker defaults to it), and write down four numbers: typical spread at the hours the EA trades, spread at the worst hour it trades, average open slippage, average close slippage. Then take the average winning trade in points from Trade statistics.
Worked example. A London-open breakout trading bot on GBPUSD: typical spread 9 points, spread at 08:00 London 24 points, open slippage −3 points, close slippage −5 points, commission equivalent to 6 points round trip. Round-trip cost at the hour it actually trades is roughly 24 + 3 + 5 + 6 = 38 points, or 3.8 pips. If the average winner is 11 pips, costs are about a third of the edge. Survivable at this broker, fragile at a worse one. If the average winner is 5 pips, the EA is a broker arbitrage and you should say so.
The slippage cost calculator does this arithmetic across a trade count, and the expectancy calculator shows how much a few extra points per trade move the average trade.
Reading the slippage sign honestly
Slippage is signed, so you can see whether fills help or hurt. A few things buyers will notice and you should pre-empt.
- Consistently negative close slippage on take-profits means the broker is filling exits worse than requested. A backtest never shows this; your record does, which is a point in your favour if you own it.
- Positive slippage on nearly every trade is a demo-server signature. On a real account it is rare. If your account is real and shows it, explain the broker's execution model in the listing.
- A symbol with far worse slippage than the rest is often the one the EA trades during news. Buyers who read the Activity & timing card will spot the hour clustering anyway.
- Zero slippage everywhere on MetaTrader 4 does not mean perfect fills. MT4 reports slippage only on stop-loss and take-profit closes, so market closes are simply not measured.
Spread at the hour that matters
The intraday spread histogram is the part of the audit most sellers get wrong by looking at the daily average. A 24-hour average of 8 points on EURUSD says nothing about an Asian-session scalper that trades when the spread is 15, or a news EA that fires at 30. Look at the distribution at the EA's trading hours, because that is where the buyer's own broker will be compared.
If your EA's hours are the wide-spread hours, you have two honest options. Publish it and set expectations in the listing, or move the EA to an account whose spread profile suits it and publish that. What does not work is hiding the Execution section and hoping. The section toggle exists for privacy reasons, but a scalping EA with Execution hidden reads as a scalping EA with something to hide.
Presenting it in the listing
Two or three plain sentences next to the verified link do more than a chart. For example: "Record built on a raw-spread ECN account, $7 per lot round trip. Typical EURUSD spread at trading hours 3 to 6 points; average close slippage −2 points. Standard-account results will be lower; see the Execution section on the verified page." That is the whole audit, and it is checkable.
Buyers who then open broker cost audit will be doing the exercise you already did, and arriving at the numbers you already gave them. That is what a track record that sells feels like from the buyer's side: no surprises.
When the audit says the EA is thin
Sometimes the honest answer is that the edge is small and the costs are most of it. You can still sell that EA, to the right buyer, with the right broker recommendation and a clear statement of which account types it suits. What you cannot do any more is sell it as broker-independent. An execution quality audit published from a live-synced source is, in the end, the difference between an EA vendor and a screenshot vendor.
Do it in one place
On ConfirmedTrades, every published account shows its verification badges, an AI strategy analysis that flags martingale, grid and missing stop-losses, the full drawdown and risk stats, and execution costs per symbol — so you can vet a strategy before you trust it, or prove your own.