Pending orders overnight: do you leave limit and stop orders open while you sleep?
Leaving orders in the market overnight lets you trade levels without watching the screen. It also means an order can fill during a thin session, on a spike, or at a worse price than you planned.
Share your approach:
- Do you leave pending orders open overnight or over a weekend, or cancel them?
- Do you use an expiry time on orders?
- Have you had an order filled by a spike or a gap? What happened to the fill price?
The order types guide covers how limit and stop orders fill, bid, ask and slippage explains why fills can differ from the order price, and weekend gaps shows what happens between the Friday close and the Sunday open.
Background: Bid, ask and slippage: why your order fills at a different price
Why buy trades open at one price and close at another, why a stop can trigger when the chart never touched it, and how slippage happens.
Why did my stop-loss trigger when the price on the chart didn't reach it?
Charts usually show the bid price, but a sell position's stop is triggered by the ask. If the spread widened, the ask could have touched your stop while the bid line stayed away from it.
What is slippage?
The difference between the price you expected and the price your order was filled at. It is most common in fast or thin markets, such as around news releases.
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Some mechanics worth knowing before you decide, because they explain most "my order filled at a strange price" stories.
- A buy stop or sell stop becomes a market order when triggered. In a thin session or on a gap, it fills at the next available price, which can be well beyond your level.
- A limit order won't fill at a worse price than you set, but it can fill on a brief spike and then sit in a losing position.
- Spreads often widen around the daily rollover, shortly after 5 p.m. New York time. Because buy orders trigger on the ask, a wide spread can trigger a buy stop even if the bid never reached your level.
- Weekend gaps can move price straight through pending orders at the Sunday open.
Many platforms let you set an expiry, such as good till the end of the day, which removes the risk of forgetting an order exists. Background: order types and weekend gaps.
Do you set expiries, or cancel manually?
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