Signal delay

Signal delay is the time between the moment a signal provider decides on a trade and the moment your order reaches the venue; it includes the provider's own posting delay, the delivery time of the messaging platform, the automation's intake and checks, and the order round-trip, and it is the main reason followers get worse prices than the provider.

Why it matters

Many providers trade first and post afterwards, sometimes minutes later, and some post entries that are already deep in profit on their own account. Whatever the automation does, that part of the delay cannot be recovered; what can be controlled is everything after the message exists. A slow copier, a home computer that polls every 30 seconds, or a manual reader who is asleep adds delay on top. For fast-moving crypto signals the difference between two seconds and two minutes is frequently the difference between filling inside the entry zone and chasing a move that has already happened.

How AlgoVesta handles it

AlgoVesta receives Telegram messages through a live session rather than polling, and webhooks arrive over HTTP as soon as they are sent, so the intake side adds well under 100 ms. Parsing and risk checks are done in memory, and the order is sent from execution servers near the venues, with an average end-to-end time of about 4.1 seconds on crypto exchanges and about 1.2 seconds on MetaTrader 5. What cannot be controlled, the provider's delay, is handled by the entry-zone rules: a signal whose price has already left the zone by the time it would execute can be skipped or limited to a chosen deviation, and the signal log records the price at execution so you can measure a channel's real delay over time. See execution latency and crypto automation.

Example

A channel posts "SOLUSDT LONG 140.00-140.50" at 09:15:00, having entered at 139.80 at 09:12. AlgoVesta receives the message at 09:15:00.5 and, with the entry-zone rule set to allow 0.3% deviation, executes at 09:15:03 at 140.61, which is within the allowed band. A follower reading the channel by hand at 09:20 finds SOL at 142.10 and either chases or misses the trade.

Common mistakes

• Blaming the automation for delay that happened before the message was posted.
• Following channels whose posted entries are consistently far from the live price without an entry-zone rule.
• Running the copier on a device that sleeps or loses connectivity.
• Comparing your fills with the provider's claimed entries instead of with the price at message time.