Quote from frostengine:
I am using 1 tick slippage per trade, not per side. And its using market orders to enter. Since the spread on the ES generally stays pretty tight at just 1 tick with large bid and asks on both sides I figured this should be sufficient. Perhaps I should throw in another tick of slippage in future calculations just to be safe....
Also good point about it netting just over 1 tick per trade. I had not thought about it that way. You are right those margins are too small.
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I think 1 tick slippage is fine then. Others might disagree but the alternative of 2 ticks is far too conservative for me.
Of course, in the end it's just a question of where you make the deductions. My slippage assumptions for my systems are aggressive (assume little or none as a base) but I require my systems to run at a high enough margin to absorb any unforseen problems (eg high slippage) without the results falling apart. The one exception is, where using limits, I require the market to trade through my price to initiate a trade in backtesting.