Every pair has two prices: the bid you sell at and the ask you buy at. The gap between them is the spread, your first trading cost.

What is Bid and Ask?

Look at any pair in MetaTrader and you will see two prices, not one. The lower is the bid; the higher is the ask. You do not get to pick — you buy at the ask and sell at the bid, always. The small gap between them is where your broker earns its cut, and it is a cost you pay on every single trade.

What they are

The bid is the price at which the market will buy the pair from you — so it is the price you sell at.
The ask (sometimes "offer") is the price at which the market will sell the pair to you — so it is the price you buy at.

The ask is always higher than the bid. That is not a glitch; it is how the pricing works.

Who trades at which price

It reads back to front at first, so hold onto the rule: you sell at the bid, you buy at the ask. The words describe what the other side is doing. The market "bids" a price to buy from you, and "asks" a price to sell to you. From your seat, the bid is your exit when selling and the ask is your entry when buying.

The spread between them

The distance from bid to ask is the spread. On a liquid major it might be a fraction of a pip; on an exotic or during quiet hours it widens. Because you buy high (ask) and sell low (bid), every trade starts slightly underwater — you have to make back the spread before you see a penny of profit. This is covered in full in what is a spread.

A worked example

GBP/USD shows bid 1.2699 / ask 1.2701 — a 2-pip spread. You buy one lot at the ask, 1.2701. If you changed your mind and sold immediately, you would sell at the bid, 1.2699, and take a 2-pip loss. On a standard lot that 2 pips is about $20, roughly £16, gone the instant you open. The market has not moved; the spread has simply done its job. Price now needs to climb past 1.2701 before your buy is truly in profit.

Why it matters

For an EA that trades often, the spread is not a rounding error. A scalper opening 40 trades a day pays that £16-ish cost 40 times over, whatever the strategy does. A backtest run on unrealistically tight spreads can look profitable and then bleed on a live account where the real bid-ask gap is wider. The two prices are the difference between a system that works on paper and one that works with money.

Watch the spread at news time and the session rollover. It can jump from 1 pip to 10 in seconds, and an EA that ignores it will open trades into a cost it never accounted for.

The Karnek note

Karnek records the price each of your trades actually filled at, read from your live terminal, so you can see the real spread you paid rather than the one a backtest assumed. It is read-only and can never place or close a trade.

See it in Karnek: see how Karnek works.