Reading slippage in your first 200 live trades

Once you go live, slippage; the gap between the price your signal expected and the price you actually got; quietly shapes your real-world returns. Here's a practical way to read it over your first couple hundred trades so you can tell the difference between normal friction and a real problem.

Start by logging two prices for every trade: the signal price (where the alert fired) and your actual fill. The average difference, in basis points, is your baseline slippage. For our daily-bar timeframe on liquid leveraged ETFs, small and roughly symmetric slippage is normal and expected.

The warning sign isn't slippage existing; it's slippage that's consistently one-directional and large. If your fills are reliably worse than signal by a meaningful margin, look at order type, time of submission relative to the close, and whether you're trading during illiquid windows. Often the fix is mechanical, not strategic.

By the time you hit the $250K reassessment point, you'll have enough trades to compute slippage with confidence. Fold that real number back into your expectations. A strategy that's profitable in backtest but ignores realistic slippage is fooling you; one that survives your measured slippage is real.

Keep the log simple and consistent. The goal isn't a perfect spreadsheet; it's a habit that turns a vague worry ('am I getting bad fills?') into a number you can actually act on.