Adrian ReidFounder of Enlightened Stock Trading

Most Traders Don't Notice This Slippage Pattern

24 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:10

In this solo video, Adrian Reid explains that a single large slippage event on one trade is less concerning than repeatedly experiencing high slippage across many trades. He emphasizes evaluating slippage at the system level—over hundreds or thousands of trades—rather than focusing on individual trade outcomes. By aggregating slippage data, traders can determine whether the average slippage is sustainable or if it will erode the strategy’s profitability, prompting corrective actions. Reid also points viewers to additional videos on the Enlightened Stock Trading channel for deeper coverage of related topics.

Chapters

If you've got huge slippage on one trade out of your strategy, is that something you really should be worrying about? If we're getting negative slippage on a whole bunch of other trades or zero slippage on a whole bunch of other trades, and this just happened to be one outlier that was a little bit illiquid, then it's not a big deal. But if we're getting 3%, 5%, 2%, 1%, 7%, you know, high numbers over and over again, then it becomes a problem. So slippage is one of those things that we have to think about kind of like a trading system. We don't think about the individual trades and, oh my God, I made money or I lost money on this trade. We think about the system and over thousands of trades or hundreds of trades, how does the, how is the slippage working? So if you start trading a system and you've got 5 or 6 trades and the slippage measure calculations are going to be kind of all over the place. But after you get a bunch of trades and the average sort of smooths out and you can see, okay, what am I really getting over many trades? Then you can start making decisions about is this sustainable or not? Is it going to kill the system or not? Do I need to do something about it? If you want to go deeper, I've got more videos on topics like this on the Enlightened Stock Trading channel.