From my twitter feed:
- 17 minutes ago
- just had longest market order fill ever on CE… 2.5 minutes! I wanted 29.40 but got 29.53. Bastards! Broker investigating…
- 3 minutes ago
- scottrade price-improved me to 29.40 on my bad CE fill. So, when I called them bastards, what I meant was, they rule. :-)
Here’s the 10-minute chart of the trade on Celanese Corporation (NYSE: CE). The blue lines mark the (admittedly sloppy) ascending triangle I was using as the basis of the trade. My stop was under the lower trendline. My target was a push above the HOD, which was 2R away. It was hit fairly quickly.
Now, about that fill… Two and a half minutes, on a market order. “My, this order is taking a long time,” I observed calmly. Yeah, right! I was severely pissed off. I watched lots of prints go by. The price walked up 15 cents from my intended entry at 29.40, with thousands of shares trading. I tried to cancel my order several times, but it wouldn’t let me since it was a NYSE market order that was in the queue already. Talk about a helpless feeling! Plus, since I was finally filled as the price was on the way down from its initial spike, I started off this trade in the red. That was no fun!
But, I held it together, and waited for the price to run up again. Luckily, it never went below 29.35 or so. At 29.33, I would have been in the red by my intended 1R amount, and I’d have to make a hard decision about bailing, or sticking to my original stop loss point (which would mean risking more than I initially intended to risk).
After I was out of the trade, I called up Scottrade. I’ve only done that a couple times, but it has always been a very pleasant experience. They looked at the trade, and about 15 minutes later they price improved me to the ask price at the time I entered my order. Very nice! Even though other brokers have more frills, it’s stuff like this that keeps me with scottrade. Plus, I know if it ever gets really bad I can go down the street to their office and yell at someone in person. Gotta love that.
| Stocks Mentioned In This Article | |
|---|---|
| Stock | Links |
| CE |  |  |  |
March 5th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Richard, I trade with scottrade and have had the same problem, about a month ago the trade took 20 minutes….. I only trade with limit and stop orders now, no market orders. They can not cancel market orders….. And they did the same thing for me, adjusted the pricing… very good service, all be it scary waiting to see an order fill….. good luck
March 5th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
It’s not a reason to swear off market orders, in my opinion. Was it happening to you often, on liquid stocks? My fills are usually instantaneous… this was an anomaly I’ve only seen a couple times across years of trading. I’ve never heard of a Scottrade case that wasn’t fixed immediately.
I don’t think anyone can cancel a market order once it’s beyond a certain stage… that’s not just a scottrade issue as far as I know.
March 5th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
I rarely use limit orders. Whenever I have tried to cancel, I have always been able to on NYSE stocks. I have only been “burned” twice in 6 months. I use IAB.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:13 am
richard and zoomie: isn’t part of that probably due to the nature of trading on the nyse…with the hybrid system, i would think that would happen less often
March 6th, 2007 at 6:33 am
It’s definitely not the nature of nyse stocks that trades can sometimes take a minute to fill, if that’s what you mean. I’m not an expert, but my understanding was that a nyse specialist is only allowed to hold a market order for a few seconds before filling it. (6 seconds, I think?)
As for getting burned on the fill price: During those 6 seconds, however much they can manipulate the price against me is fair game, as long as they don’t execute any limit orders ahead of my market orders. That’s just the cost of nyse trading. I don’t know if the hybrid system will help with that or not, but if volume on the nyse keeps going up that will always help.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:01 am
richard: no a minute is definitely too long…for some reason i thought it was 17 seconds, but i’m not sure where my brain came up with that number
personally, when i was trading stocks, i was always more comfortable with direct access and trading on the nasdaq exclusively…u miss quite a few opportunities that way
March 6th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
This time I had the problem was an issue with getting the confirmation of the trade. They said it was a communication problem. thanks