Bid-Ask Spread Explained
The spread is the least discussed and most consistently paid cost in trading, because it never appears on a statement as a fee — and it is the only liquidity measure that is actually current.
Tag
slippage
Every StaxInvesting article tagged slippage · 7 posts.
7 articles
What Is Slippage?
Slippage is the reason a strategy can be profitable in a backtest and unprofitable in an account — and it is largest in exactly the conditions that produce a strategy's biggest moves, which is when a fixed assumption is most wrong.
Copy Trading 0DTE Strategies
Copying same-day contracts compresses every weakness in the replication pipeline into a few hours. Delay that is a rounding error on a swing trade is decisive here, and the cost of that delay grows through the session.
Copy Trading for Options: How It Differs
Almost every copy trading platform describes instruments that are continuous, never expire, and have no strike. Options break several assumptions that material quietly relies on — starting with what a missed exit signal costs.
Why Two People Copying the Same Trade Get Different Fills
Platforms describe this as a minor caveat. It is the mechanism that determines whether a good provider produces good follower outcomes — and if a strategy's edge is thinner than its replication cost, it is profitable for the provider and not for you.
Latency in Options Order Routing: What Actually Matters
Trading platforms love to advertise speed, sub-millisecond this, ultra-low-latency that. For most retail options trading, those milliseconds are noise relative to the costs that actually determine your outcomes: the bid-ask spread you pay on every trade and the slippage you take in bad conditions. This separates the latency that matters from the latency that is marketing, including a trap in how speed is measured.
0DTE Liquidity: Spreads, Fill Quality, and Slippage
0DTE options on SPX and SPY look highly liquid, and at the money they genuinely are. But the surface picture hides three things that cost real money: spreads that widen away from the money and late in the session, displayed size that barely reflects true liquidity, and fills that blow out catastrophically in exactly the fast markets you most need to exit. The through-line is slippage, the hidden cost that makes a profitable backtest an unprofitable strategy.