About The Fill Desk

What this covers

The Fill Desk is about trading costs and execution mechanics: spreads, commissions, overnight financing, slippage, liquidity, order types and fill quality. It exists because this is the part of trading most people pay for continuously and understand least, and because most of what is written about it is written by firms with an interest in the answer.

The front page is a ledger rather than a list of articles. Every cost is on one screen with four questions answered in the row: what it is, when it is charged, who sets it, and whether you can do anything about it. Of the 12 entries, we say 5 are genuinely reducible. The rest you influence at the margin or simply pay, and we would rather say so than sell a technique for removing something that cannot be removed.

What we are not

We are not a broker. We do not execute trades, hold money, or connect to anyone’s account. We do not offer signals, strategies, managed accounts or tuition, and nothing here is advice about what you should do with your own money.

We do not rank or rate brokers. Doing that credibly needs execution data we do not have, and a league table built from impressions would be exactly the kind of confident-sounding, unsupported claim this publication exists to argue against.

Who writes it

Articles are written and maintained by the The Fill Desk Editorial desk and published under that name. There is no individual byline, no photograph and no biography, because inventing one would be a fabricated fact on a site whose first rule is not to state those. If named contributors join, they will appear here with real details.

How it is funded

The Fill Desk has a commercial relationship, and where a page carries a promotional link it is labelled as promotional, marked as sponsored for search engines, and explained on the page it appears on. There is no sitewide advertising link, and the relationship does not decide what we cover or what we conclude. The full terms are on the commercial disclosure page.

What we will not publish

• Invented figures. Spreads, commissions and financing rates vary by broker, instrument, account and hour. We do not quote one as though it were universal. Where a number appears, it is cited and dated.
• Performance claims. No profit figures, no returns, no win rates, no equity curves — including in illustrations.
• Unsourced statistics. Every factual claim is recorded in a research ledger with its evidence and its status, and an article cannot be approved while a claim in it remains unresolved.
• Certainty we do not have. Where the honest answer is “this varies” or “we could not verify that”, the page says so.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it. Contact details are here. Where a correction changes the substance of an article, the change is reflected in the article’s updated date — which moves only when the body genuinely changes, not when the page is rebuilt.