What this site is for
Most writing about trading is either an advertisement or a definition. An advertisement wants you to open an account. A definition tells you what a word means and leaves you no better off. Slippage Desk tries to do the harder and more useful thing: explain the mechanism. Why does this charge exist? What is it paying for? What does it actually do to a position? Someone who understands why a thing exists can work out the rest without being told.
What we cover
- Order types. Certainty of fill or certainty of price. Never both.
- The order book. Two queues, and why the price is just the top row.
- Slippage and impact. The cost of taking size out of a thin ladder.
- Rejections. The four families of reasons an order never lands.
We do not cover everything. A site that explains one subject carefully is worth more than one that has a thin page about every subject.
The rule about numbers
This is the rule that shapes every page: no figure on this site is presented as what any company actually charges, pays or takes. We do not run funded test accounts, we do not time our own withdrawals, and we do not maintain a price feed. So we do not publish those numbers at all, rather than borrow them from somewhere and hope they are still true.
Our explainers still use arithmetic, because a cost you cannot calculate is a cost you cannot plan around. Every number in a worked example is one the article invents for the purpose and says so plainly, so you can follow the method and then put your own real figures in. The method is the part that keeps working next month. See how we check what goes on a page.
How this site makes money, and what that cannot buy
Some links to trading venues are referral links, and if you open an account through one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. What that cannot buy is a sentence. It cannot buy a ranking, a description, a removed drawback, or an article. Explainers on this site are written without any venue as their subject, which is the simplest possible protection against the money bending the writing. The detail is in our affiliate disclosure.
What we will never do
- Sell signals, or predict a price.
- Promise income, returns, or anything "guaranteed".
- Print a fee, limit or processing time as a fact when we have not read it at its source.
- Claim a measurement we did not make.
Trading is genuinely risky and most retail accounts lose money. The job of this site is to make you harder to surprise, not more confident.