The price you see quoted is the mid price or last traded price. It does not represent unlimited size available at that level. A market order fills level by level against available order book depth, so the result depends on how much liquidity is resting near that price when you place the order.
Small orders in liquid instruments (for example, BTC or ETH) typically fill at or very close to the quoted price. Larger orders, or orders in less liquid instruments, may fill meaningfully away from the quoted price. The difference between the quoted price and your average fill price is slippage. Slippage is a normal feature of live-market-style execution and is not unique to Breakout.
Example: A trader on a $100,000 Breakout Evaluation account placed a single market buy order for 2,369,106 POPCAT (approximately $100,000 notional) while POPCAT was quoted at a mid price of approximately 0.04221. At the time of the order, resting ask liquidity near the mid was well under 500,000 POPCAT — a fraction of the size needed to fill the order. The order swept the available levels and filled at an average price of approximately 0.04247, roughly 0.6% above the quoted mid. Before the market moved a single tick, the position was already down several hundred dollars to slippage and trading fees on execution alone. Closing the full position with a single market order would incur a comparable cost on the other side of the book.
To manage execution costs on larger orders:
● Check available depth before sizing an order, using the Order Book and Depth Chart in the Breakout terminal.
● Split large orders into several smaller market orders spaced out over time, giving the order book time to refill between fills.
● Use limit orders where possible. Note that limit orders on the Breakout terminal do not support partial fills — if the full size isn't available at your limit price, the order will not fill. Splitting limit orders into smaller sizes can help here as well.
● Account for reduced liquidity outside active trading hours, on weekends, in lower-cap instruments, and around major news events — the same order size can produce materially more slippage under these conditions.
Slippage is a real cost of live-market-style execution, the same as trading fees, and should be factored into position sizing on larger accounts.
