Trade Execution: Working an Order Without Giving It Away

The cost of a trade is not the commission and not the spread. It is the gap between what the decision would have earned on paper and what the account actually got, and the largest component is often the shares that never traded. This path builds implementation shortfall, then the scheduling optimisation that trades impact against timing risk, then the placement decisions underneath every slice. It ends on why execution quality is far easier to produce than to prove.