What Is a Requote in Forex Trading?

You click Buy. Your entry is exactly where you planned it. Then a popup appears: “Prices have changed. New price: [different number]. Accept?” If you’ve seen this before, you know the irritation. If you’re new to forex, your first instinct is probably: Did my broker just change the price on me? What is a requote in forex trading?

Usually, the answer is no. A requote in forex is not a broker scam. It’s a mechanical outcome of how your broker processes orders — and understanding it will change how you respond when it happens, how often it disrupts your trading, and whether your current broker setup is actually working for you.

What Actually Happens During a Forex Requote

When you place a market order, you’re asking your broker to fill you at the price currently shown on your screen. The problem: that price existed a fraction of a second ago. By the time your order travels from your device to the broker’s server, the market may have moved.

What happens next depends entirely on how your broker processes orders — and this mechanic works the same way across retail brokers, independent accounts, and prop trading platforms alike.

With certain broker types, if the price has shifted beyond an acceptable range, the broker won’t fill your order at the old price. Instead, it pauses and sends back a notification: “The price you requested is no longer available. Here’s the new price. Do you want to proceed?”

That notification — with a revised price and an accept/decline prompt — is the forex requote.

In MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, the two platforms most beginners encounter first, this shows up as a small dialog box. It displays your original requested price alongside the new price being offered, and gives you a button to accept or cancel. The window typically stays open for a few seconds. If you don’t respond in time, the order is cancelled automatically.

That choice is the key point. A requote doesn’t execute against your will at a worse price. It asks. You have veto power — which is exactly what distinguishes it from slippage.

Why Requotes Happen: The Broker Model Behind Them

Requotes aren’t random. They’re structural — built into how specific brokers process orders. To understand why a requote happens, you need to understand the two main execution models in retail forex.

Instant Execution (Market Makers)

With instant execution, you specify both the price and volume when you place an order. Your broker commits to filling you at that exact price — if it’s still available when your order arrives.

When the price shifts before your order is processed, the broker has a problem: it promised you a specific price, but that price is gone. Rather than fill you automatically at a dramatically different level, it pauses and sends you the requote.

This model is almost exclusively used by market maker brokers — firms that take the opposite side of your trades internally rather than routing orders to external liquidity providers. Because they control their own pricing, they have both the ability and the incentive to pause and reprice when market conditions shift. The requote is how that repricing reaches you.

If you’re trading with leverage, this matters more than it might seem at first — because how leverage amplifies every pip of price difference means a requote you accept without thinking can shift your risk-reward ratio in ways that weren’t in your original plan.

Market Execution (ECN/STP)

With market execution, you specify only the volume. The fill price is determined by whatever’s available in the market when your order arrives at the liquidity pool.

ECN and STP brokers route your orders directly to external liquidity providers. If the price has moved between when you clicked and when the order is processed, it fills at the new market price — automatically, no popup, no confirmation. That price difference is called slippage, not a requote.

This is why ECN/STP brokers almost never issue requotes. Every order executes. Whether you like the price you received is a separate question entirely.

Requote vs. Slippage in Forex — What’s the Difference

Both requotes and slippage happen because prices move in the milliseconds between your click and your order’s execution. But the experience is completely different.

	Requote	Slippage
Does the trade execute automatically?	No — you decide	Yes
Do you get a choice?	Yes	No
Typical broker type	Market maker (instant execution)	ECN/STP (market execution)
Can it work in your favor?	You can decline a bad price	Positive slippage is possible
Disrupts your entry timing?	Yes — popup causes a delay	No — but price may be worse

The practical trade-off: a requote in forex gives you control in the moment, but that popup can destroy your entry timing during a fast move. Slippage executes regardless — you stay in the market, but at a price you didn’t select.

Neither is objectively better. They’re consequences of two different execution architectures. If you’re working to get a funded account, the execution model of your evaluation platform is fixed from day one — so knowing which type you’re dealing with tells you exactly which problem to prepare for.

When Are Forex Requotes Most Likely to Happen

Requotes cluster around two conditions: fast-moving markets and high latency. Fast markets are the bigger factor by a wide margin.

During major economic releases — Non-Farm Payrolls, central bank rate decisions, CPI data — currency pairs can move 30–50 pips in under a second. If you’re trying to enter at exactly the right moment during that spike, your requested price is almost certainly gone before your order reaches the broker’s server. Understanding how to trade around high-impact news events means accounting for requotes as part of your execution plan, not just your signal.

Here’s a concrete example. Sarah is trading EUR/USD ahead of an ECB interest rate decision. She spots a setup and clicks Buy at 1.0850. Her order reaches her market maker broker’s server roughly 200 milliseconds later. In that time, the announcement drops and EUR/USD moves to 1.0820. The broker can’t fill at 1.0850 — so a requote appears: “New price: 1.0819. Accept?”

Sarah is now 31 pips from her intended entry. Her original stop-loss no longer makes sense at this fill. She declines. That was the right call.

High latency is the second factor. A slow internet connection, high ping, or an overloaded broker server all lengthen the time between your click and the broker’s receipt of your order. The longer that delay, the more opportunity prices have to move. Traders who need tight execution sometimes use a VPS (Virtual Private Server) physically located near their broker’s servers to cut this lag from 100–200ms to under 10ms — not a fix for everyone, but worth knowing about if you notice consistent requotes on entries that should be clean.

Low-liquidity sessions also produce more requotes — late Sunday evenings, post-weekend market opens, major holidays — because thinner order books mean larger gaps between the price you see and the price the broker can actually execute. Repeated bad fills during these sessions add up, and over time that kind of execution drag starts creating the sort of margin pressure that builds from consistently poor execution — before you’ve even made a bad trade.

How to Respond to a Requote in the Moment

When the requote popup appears, you have a few seconds. Most beginners either freeze or accept automatically out of fear of missing the move. Both responses are wrong.

Accepting without thinking means entering at a price that may break your setup’s logic entirely. Freezing means the popup expires and the order is cancelled anyway. What you need is a fast, repeatable framework that doesn’t depend on how you’re feeling in the moment.

Ask yourself four questions in order:

1. How far off is the new price? One or two pips from your intended entry is usually acceptable in a valid setup. Ten or more pips almost certainly invalidates your original analysis.
2. Does your stop-loss still work? Your risk was calculated from a specific entry price. A significantly different fill changes your effective risk-reward ratio. Recalculate fast — don’t accept first and think later.
3. Is the trade still valid at this new level? If the market has already moved far in the direction of your trade, you may now be chasing an extended move rather than entering the setup you identified.
4. Am I accepting this because it makes sense, or because I’m afraid to miss out? FOMO-driven decisions in trading don’t get better when a countdown timer is involved.

A checklist for the moment the requote appears:

• New price is within 2–3 pips of my original entry → accepting is likely fine
• New price is 5+ pips away → recalculate risk-reward before accepting
• New price is 10+ pips away → decline unless there is a specific reason to proceed
• My stop-loss still produces an acceptable risk-reward at the new entry → proceed
• The trade has already moved significantly without me → decline, wait for the next setup

On a prop firm evaluation, a bad entry from an unthinking requote acceptance can eat into your drawdown allowance faster than you’d expect. And the emotional trading that follows a bad entry — trying to recover the loss quickly — tends to cause more damage than the original bad fill.

The discipline is simple: treat each requote as a fresh decision. Would you have planned this trade from the new price if that had been your entry all along? If not, decline.

How to Reduce Requotes in Your Trading

You can’t eliminate forex requotes entirely if you’re on a broker with instant execution. But you can reduce how often they interrupt you and limit the damage when they do appear.

Use the Maximum Deviation setting in MT4/MT5. In the order window, there’s an option: “Enable Maximum Deviation from Quoted Price.” When active and set to a value — 2 or 3 pips is reasonable for major pairs in normal conditions — you’re telling the broker to fill you automatically if the price has moved within that range, with no popup. If the price has moved further, the requote appears as usual. This eliminates execution interruptions for routine small movements while still protecting you from large unexpected gaps. Set it too wide and you’re accepting slippage-sized fills without being asked; set it too tight and you’ll still see requotes during any meaningful volatility.

Avoid entering during high-impact news events. Most requotes occur in the 30 seconds bracketing major scheduled releases. If your strategy doesn’t require news entries, step away during those windows. The events that cause requotes are all listed on any economic calendar in advance — there’s no excuse to be caught off guard.

Trade during peak liquidity hours. The London–New York session overlap (roughly 1:00 PM–5:00 PM GMT) offers the deepest order books on major currency pairs. More active participants mean tighter spreads and smaller gaps between quoted and executable prices, which directly reduces requote frequency.

Understand your execution environment before you commit to it. If requotes are a constant problem, the issue may not be your strategy — it may be your broker’s execution model. Stepping into a funded account without knowing whether the platform uses instant or market execution is a common setup mistake that traders only notice after their first unexpected popup mid-challenge. And if you’re still deciding which format to pursue, the challenge structure and conditions you choose will affect your execution environment and trading rules from day one — worth understanding before you pay the challenge fee.

The Core Distinction That Changes Everything

A requote in forex is your broker saying: “The price you asked for is gone. Here’s where the market is right now — do you want the trade?”

Whether you receive requotes at all comes down to one thing: execution model. Market makers using instant execution issue them. ECN/STP brokers using market execution don’t — and any fill difference shows up as slippage instead.

Once you understand that, the right responses become clear. Use Maximum Deviation to smooth out minor gaps. Stay out of the market during news spikes if precise entries matter to your strategy. Treat every requote as a fresh decision, not an obstacle to click past. And know that declining a requote with a large price difference is almost always the correct call — the trade you didn’t take costs nothing compared to an entry that breaks your setup’s logic from the start.

Traders looking to apply this knowledge in a live funded environment can explore PropLynq.