A requote is when a broker can't fill at your requested price and offers a new one. Here's why it happens, how it hits scalpers and EAs, and how to reduce them.

What is a Requote?

A requote is the broker coming back to say the price you asked for has gone, and here's a new one — take it or leave it. You click buy at 1.1050 and instead of a fill you get a pop-up offering 1.1052. In quiet markets it's rare. In fast ones, or on a dealing desk, it's a familiar delay that costs you the exact price you wanted.

What it is

Requotes belong to instant execution, where you request a specific price and the broker either fills it or doesn't. If the market has moved between your click and the broker processing it, MT4 shows a requote: the new price, and a choice to accept or decline. Decline, and you've missed the trade; accept, and you're in at a worse level than you intended. Either way you've lost time and, usually, a pip or two of the edge you were trading for.

How it works

The gap the requote fills is the fraction of a second between you requesting a price and the broker acting on it. In a fast-moving market — around news, at the open, during a spike — price can move several pips in that window, so the level you asked for genuinely no longer exists. That's the honest version. The less honest version is a dealing-desk broker that takes the other side of your trade and chooses whether to fill you, using requotes to avoid the prices that would cost it money. From your seat the two look identical: a pop-up, a worse price, a decision to make in a hurry.

A worked example

Say a scalper trades a strategy that needs to enter at a precise level and aims for six or eight pips a trade. A requote adds half a second and pushes the entry two pips worse. On one trade it's an annoyance. Across fifty trades a day it's a hundred pips of edge handed back to the broker before costs — enough to turn a profitable system into a losing one. The strategy didn't change. The execution did, and for a scalper the execution is most of the strategy.

The impact on scalpers and EAs

Requotes hit fast, precise strategies hardest. A human can eyeball a pop-up and click accept; an EA usually can't, so a requote often comes back to it as a failed order — MT4's error 138 — and the trade is simply missed. A strategy built on exact entries starts skipping trades or taking worse ones, and its live results drift away from the backtest that never modelled requotes at all. The more your edge depends on the precise price, the more a requote costs you.

Market execution vs instant execution

The fix built into the platform is execution type. With instant execution you're promised a specific price, which is exactly why a requote can happen when it can't be honoured. With market execution you're filled at the best price available right now — no pop-up, no requote — but you may get slippage instead, a fill slightly better or worse than you expected. Most traders prefer that trade-off: a filled order at a near price beats a requote pop-up while the move you wanted runs away without you.

How to reduce requotes

Use an ECN or STP broker with market execution rather than a dealing-desk market maker.
Run your EA on a VPS close to the broker's server, so the request-to-fill gap is milliseconds.
Set a maximum deviation or slippage in the order, so acceptable moves fill automatically instead of prompting a requote.
Avoid trading the seconds around high-impact news, when requotes and slippage are worst.
If requotes only ever appear when you're winning, that asymmetry is a red flag about the broker, not the market.

The Karnek note

Requotes and slippage show up as the gap between the price you meant to trade and the one you actually got. Karnek reads the filled trades straight from your terminal, so what you see is what genuinely executed — not the theoretical entry a backtest assumed. It reads read-only and can never place a trade or touch your account.

See it in Karnek: see how Karnek works, read-only monitoring for every MT4 and MT5 account.