Price Manipulation?

I would like to write about price manipulation.

Recently, I've gotten a very useful info from one of the brokers I use. A couple of days ago, I placed an order manually and set TP and SL. After a while, although my price had touched the TP, it didn't close in profit, but after that, my long position hit the SL when it's slightly above my SL level.

I took screenshots for both cases and sent them to the broker. They explained to me that the price information you see in Market Watch or the bar below Terminal window is Weighted Average Price, which means that the price shown on MT4 could differ about 0.3 pips from the actual price you get.

In other words, the price info you get on MT4 is slightly smoothed and it doesn't acurately reflect very fast, tiny fluctuation of the real price that brokers get.

This explained very well about the past experience I got with other brokers. If you were not happy with such filling of or non-filling of your position, then you would have to search for different brokers all the time because such up-to-0.3 pip difference can take place everywhere.

This applies scalpers only. Swing traders will not care such tiny moves.

Many slcalping EAs nowadays don't use hard TP and SL, and they place internally programmed TP and SL somewhere in the course of trading. They insist that such internal program was designed in order to avoid stop loss hunting. Yes, that makes sense, but by letting the EA close its position as if it's done manually, such EA can avoid such unwanted no-fills to TP or fills to SL.

I don't think brokers monitor every traders' trading activities all the time. So if you encountered similar cases as I did, just remember my post.