How do I analyse a closed trade and check for slippage?

1. Open your trade history from your platform of choice or the ‘live accounts’ tab of the relevant account from the My IG dashboard
2. Locate the trade in question and take note of the market name (pay attention to expiries if you traded forwards for futures), the direction of your trade, the exact time the trade was closed and the price you received
3. Open the specific market’s chart using our IG web or mobile trading platform. If you’re using a third-party platform like MetaTrader 4 (MT4) or ProRealTime (PRT), we advise against using their charts to analyse your past trades because you’ll only be able to view the bid price on MT4 and the mid price on PRT
4. Ensure you’re using the correct price settings (bid price for a closed long position, and ask price for a closed short position)

Desktop: right click anywhere on your chart which will open a chart setting menu. Select ‘price’ then choose the appropriate price.

Mobile: open your chart in full screen then tap the bottom of the screen to bring up the chart toolbar. Select the button that reads ‘bid’, ‘ask’, ‘mid’ or ‘last traded’ then choose the appropriate price from the pop-up menu.

5. We recommend using candlestick charts (default setting) with a one-minute time interval when analysing past trades. This means each candlestick will show you the opening, closing, high, and low prices for each minute of trading activity

Desktop: click on the button at the top left of the chart and select the appropriate time interval from the pop-up menu.

Mobile: open your chart in full screen then tap the bottom of the screen to bring up the chart toolbar. Select ‘time interval’ and choose the appropriate time interval from the pop-up menu.

6. Navigate to the exact minute your trade was closed and compare the appropriate bid or ask price you requested to the price received as per your trade history (found in step 1). If you received a worse price than what you requested, you were negatively slipped. If you received a better price than you expected, you were positively slipped. To avoid negative slippage, you can consider using a guaranteed stop-loss

7. To check if your trade was correctly executed based on the prices shown on the charts at that specific time, you can refer to the one-minute candle’s high and low range (shown by the wicks). For further accuracy, you can choose an even smaller time interval

Please note: charts are indicative and don’t always reflect the exact prices we receive from our liquidity providers.