A warning message pops up when placing marketable limit orders:
"You entered a limit price (1000) that is greater than the last price of this symbol (15.0300). It is okay to do this, but we wanted to warn you, in case you typed your order incorrectly."
I am 99% sure that up until a few days ago the message ALSO included some wording to the effect "Since this order is marketable, the order will be changed to a market order."
Question 1) Has there indeed been a change lately in the error message?
Question 2) If the old message was correct, is it still correct. Are marketable limit orders changed to market orders?
You see, I often place limit orders before the market opens. Say the current price is $100 and I want to buy at the opening UNLESS the opening price jumps above $101. If the order is changed to a market order because the LAST price (at closing) was $100, I could end up buying even if the opening price is $102. Since many stocks do indeed jump significantly between opening and closing, how these orders is handled will greatly affect my strategy.
P.S. Is there a forum for users to discuss with other users issues like what features are available in C2, or the meaning of financial terminology, or how to find financial info on the internet? This forum seems to be for communicating with C2 staff, while the others all seem to be related to specific software or specific trading systems.
this forum would best be classified as "modestly participated." If you want active forum discussion, try elitetraders.com, trade2win.com or perhaps traderslaboratory.com (sp?)
Chopping it into a lot of subtopics would probably yield little active participation. some existing C2 forum threads may go unused for days.
Tim:
Nothing regarding marketable orders has been changed. Basically, the warning is designed to help you catch yourself if you type in something (which seems) obviously wrong.
An example would be if the price of a stock is 15.03 and you type: "Buy limit 1000"
Buy limit 1000 means “I want to buy if the price is $1,000 or lower.” Entering that for a stock that is trading at $15 usually indicates the operator mistyped his entry or forgot a decimal point, or something like that.
Now, what happens if you insist on entering a Buy Limit $1,000 when the stock is trading at $15? Nothing special – you’ll get filled at the market price. You are saying, “I’m willing to pay $1,000” and the market is saying, "Uh, yeah, but we’ll sell it to you for $15."
That’s how any broker would handle this scenario.
I wonder if perhaps in the case you mentioned in your post you were mixing up stops and limits? A Buy Stop at $1,000 means “I want to buy … but only when the price reaches $1,000.” Obviously that’s a very different case. In that case, your stop order will sit there, unexecuted, until the market reaches $1,000 or until you cancel or expire the order.
Would be nice to catch yourself on erroneous size entry like 100% of one’s account
That’s a good feature request. I’ll add it to the list.
thx, caz I did it twice already entering oversize by mistake.
You could even make this adjustable by individual users. For example, some people have highly diversified portfolios and having more than 10% in one stock would be unusual. For others, (like me) there are only a few stocks, so up to say 50% in one stock would be be normal. Of course, the more options, the more difficult it is to use and the more chances for a mistake!
On the flip side, you might have a warning BELOW a certain level. If you have a $100,000 acct, most likely you would not place an order for just 2 shares of a $5 stock.
