What Is Slippage?

Slippage Defined

Slippage is the difference between the expected price of a trade and the actual price at which the trade executes. When you place a market order to buy at $100, but the order fills at $100.50, you have experienced $0.50 of negative slippage. While slippage is most commonly discussed as a cost, it can also work in your favor - if your buy order fills at $99.50, that is positive slippage.

Slippage is a fundamental concept in trading that affects every market participant, from retail traders to institutional investors. Understanding its causes and knowing how to manage it can meaningfully improve your trading performance, especially when trading perpetual futures with leverage.

What Causes Slippage?

Low liquidity: The most common cause of slippage is insufficient liquidity at your target price level. If you want to buy $50,000 worth of an asset but there are only $10,000 of sell orders at the best ask price, your order will fill through multiple price levels, with each subsequent fill at a slightly worse price.

High volatility: During periods of extreme price movement - news events, large liquidation cascades, or sudden market shifts - prices change rapidly. By the time your market order reaches the matching engine, the price may have already moved away from where it was when you clicked the button.

Large order size: Even in liquid markets, very large orders will experience slippage because they consume multiple levels of the order book. A $1,000 market order on BTC might fill entirely at the best price, but a $1,000,000 order will push through many price levels.

Network latency: On blockchain-based exchanges, there can be a delay between when you submit an order and when it is processed. During this delay, other traders may execute orders that change the available liquidity, resulting in a different fill price than expected.

Impact on Your Trades

For a single small trade, slippage might cost you fractions of a percent. But over hundreds or thousands of trades, slippage compounds into a significant cost. A trader who executes 10 trades per day with average slippage of 0.05% is losing roughly 0.5% daily just to slippage - that is over 180% annualized, before counting any other trading fees.

Slippage is particularly impactful in leveraged trading. With 10x leverage, a 0.1% slippage on entry translates to a 1% impact on your margin. Add slippage on exit, and you may be down 2% before the market has even moved in your direction. For high-frequency or scalping strategies that target small moves, slippage management is often the difference between profitability and loss.

Understanding slippage also helps you evaluate whether a trading strategy is viable. If your strategy targets 0.3% moves on average but you expect 0.2% of round-trip slippage, the effective edge is only 0.1% - and any increase in slippage could make the strategy unprofitable.

How to Minimize Slippage

Use limit orders: The most effective way to avoid slippage is to use limit orders instead of market orders. A limit order only executes at your specified price or better. The trade-off is that limit orders may not fill immediately (or at all) if the price moves away from your limit.

Trade during peak hours: Liquidity is highest during overlapping market hours. For crypto, this is generally during US and European trading hours. For stock perps, liquidity peaks when the underlying stock market is open. Trading during these windows gives you tighter spreads and deeper order books.

Split large orders: If you need to execute a large position, consider breaking it into multiple smaller orders spread across time. This technique, known as order splitting or time-weighted average price (TWAP), reduces market impact and often achieves better average fills.

Choose liquid venues: Not all exchanges offer the same liquidity. Hyperliquid's central limit order book provides institutional-grade depth for major assets, making it one of the best venues for minimizing slippage in decentralized perpetual futures trading.

Slippage on Hyperliquid vs Other DEXes

Most decentralized exchanges use automated market makers (AMMs), where slippage is a mathematical certainty that increases with trade size. The bonding curve formula means that larger trades always get worse prices. This is fundamentally different from an order book exchange.

Hyperliquid uses a central limit order book (CLOB) model, similar to centralized exchanges like Binance or Coinbase. Market makers provide liquidity at specific price levels, and orders are matched in price-time priority. This architecture allows for much tighter spreads and significantly less slippage, especially for larger orders. For actively traded assets, the order book depth on Hyperliquid is competitive with major centralized exchanges, giving DeFi traders the execution quality they need without sacrificing self-custody.