Latency to your broker

Connection speed is important when it comes to trade execution. To check your latency to your broker’s trade server, you need to determine the server’s IP, then ping it

There is a good way to combine these actions by using a free program, WinMTR, by Vasile Laurentiu Stanimir (now hosted at http://winmtr.net/), which combines the tracert and ping commands. However, you would still need to determine the server’s IP through the netstat command first. (The one I show in this example is an older open source one, hosted at SourceForge.net)

Type in your broker’s IP and click ‘Start’. In this case, you can see at one node, it takes an average 26ms to clear it. This information is much more useful than getting the average of the pings across all the available nodes as in the case above.

All said, this only gives you an indication of your communication latency from your terminal to the trade server and does not give any information about the trade server’s response time. This would have to be tested by other means which I might cover later.