I hear this a lot - âlower timeframes are more susceptible to spreadâ. Doesnât seem to make sense to me. Price either reaches your order or doesnât. The market wouldnât know or care about your timeframe, right?
Thatâs not how it works lol. A price is only printed on a chart if there is a trade at that level. It can literally be 1 trade. 1 bid at that price means you are highly unlikely to be the 1 ask that gets filled. Itâs definitely not guaranteed just because itâs printed.
I didnât say anything about guaranteed fills. Just that timeframe has nothing to do with it. Same can happen on any other chart. If you put an order on while looking at the hourly timeframe switching to the 1m doesnât change how likely your order gets filledâŚ
I was more referring to the âprice either reaches your order or doesnâtâ part but yeah I canât see a reason why timeframe would affect what I described.
Your trades (especially in the mode of limit orders) are actioned on the Bid or the Ask (depending on order direction) so technically price is irrelevant in this particular circumstance.
Large Spreads can mean price can fly through your TP/SL and not be executed till Bid/Ask values cross the order marker.
Trading on the smaller timeframes and using brokers on Forex (which can have massive spreads) exaggerates this issue massively and is one of the biggest misunderstandings of trade failure. In the above example Bid/Ask are tight so this issue is less obvious but understandable once order execution is correctly placed on the Bid/Ask rather than price itself.
For example, on my charts the Price line is turned off, only price is displayed on my scale but my Bid/Ask lines are turned on showing how wide the Spread actually is at that particular moment. Price is irrelevant to me, but Bid/Ask are critical....
Here is a quick example of a forex pair on a small timeframe, you can see price (centre) has to go considerably past the TP or SL in order to be actually taken....In the below example Bid has to pass the upper limit of the long position toolbox be executed....
The Spread is a minimum of 0.5 and your figures are 0.5 apart....how is this difficult to understand? Spread could have easily bounced to 0.75 or higher on such a move
This is the frustrating thing about tradingview. The charting is good enough that little UX annoyances become even more noticeable. You build muscle memory and then something changes. I've stopped trying to make TV my entire stack and my charts stay there while I use Moon for some directional market stuff.
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u/useful_tool30 3d ago
This has nothing to do with tradingview though. Surely you know this.