Requote

A requote is a fill that came back as a question. The trader submits an order against a displayed price; the venue, instead of executing, answers with a different price and an invitation to try again. On dealing-desk retail platforms this is a formal message type — the historical default order mode meant “fill at exactly this price or ask me again”, and the requote was the platform’s built-in way of declining.

The legitimate reading is straightforward: the market moved between order and arrival, and the venue declines to honour a price that no longer exists. Prices do move, and a venue that filled every stale price would be systematically run over. In this reading the requote is the exchange-adjacent cousin of last look — a refusal in place of a hold window.

The integrity question, as with every discretionary execution mechanism, is symmetry. Interim price moves are roughly as likely to favour the client as the venue, so requotes issued honestly should arrive in both directions at comparable rates. A venue that fills instantly when the drift went its way and requotes precisely when the drift went the client’s way has converted a risk control into an option it exercises against its own customers — the requote-shaped version of adverse selection. The pattern is invisible in any single trade and unambiguous in aggregate: requote frequency conditioned on interim drift direction, broken out by session and proximity to scheduled events, characterises how the discretion is actually used.

Requotes also cost money even when declined. The round trip consumes time in exactly the fast markets where requotes cluster, and the market keeps moving while the trader decides; the eventual fill — or the abandoned trade — inherits that delay. An honest accounting books the requote into total execution cost alongside slippage, rather than treating declined fills as events that never happened.