I recently opened a live Forex trading account with Tickmill to test their live trading conditions. I previously had an account with Armada Markets and never really had any issues with execution. Tickmill was announced as the new broker to handle all of Armada's retail clients and I decided to test it out. I was looking over my trade history for the past two weeks and discovered one trade on the GBP/USD pair which looked very odd as it was much larger than my classic 30-50 pip stop, this trade was a horrendous -120 pips. When I plotted the trade on the chart, I saw that this trade experienced a 70 pip slippage on the stop-loss order during the Non-Farm Employment Change news on the 5th of June. The long entry order was also slipped by about 13 pips. The GBP/USD is probably the second most most liquid FX pair after EUR/USD, and I honestly would not have expected such heavy slippage on this pair - maybe on some of the other exotics - but not on GBP/USD.
I have been trading for quite a few years with various FX brokers and I have experienced slippage on heavy news events before, but nothing quite like this. It is well known amongst veteran and novice traders that slippage is a part of trading and has to be factored into the trading strategy, and I suppose sometimes these kinds of things happen. I guess I won't be trading around future Non-Farm news events with Tickmill anymore.
So far I have not had any other problems with Tickmill with regards to execution and trading performance during normal market conditions, but I will have to stay out of the news events because these kinds of slippages will take their toll if they start occurring on a regular basis.
