Bitcoin Order Before the Fed Decision: What Slippage Really Costs You

The information provided in this article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry a high degree of risk. Always conduct your own research.Two days before the US central bank's rate decision the euro order books are thin, and a market order pays the difference. We measured the order book depth of five exchanges ourselves: between the cheapest and the most expensive execution lay a factor of 31.When you buy Bitcoin with a market order, you rarely pay exactly the price the app showed you beforehand. The difference is called slippage, and it does not come from a fee but from the depth of the order book: your order works its way up through the sell offers on hand until it is filled. How expensive that gets depends on how much capital sits right next to the current price. We measured this ourselves across five exchanges on September 14, 2026, in three time windows between 15:51 and 15:53 UTC. The headline result: for a purchase of 100,000 euros the markup in the third window ranged from 10.50 euros to 329.86 euros, depending on which exchange you pick. That is a factor of 31 for exactly the same action in the same minut...