Dec 07 2020

Trailing Stop Order - What is it and How to Use it?
A trailing stop order is a dynamic stop order that maintains a pre-set maximum distance from the current price as long as it moves in the trader’s favour.
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By Stefano Treviso , Updated on: Oct 19 2022.
Table of Contents:
A Market Order is a type of trading order designed to achieve instant execution upon availability by buying or selling an asset at the best price available at the time of execution.
Market orders never guarantee a particular price, you never know what you could end up getting as everything really depends on availability.
Important note: Market orders get executed instantly, if you click the buy or sell button, there’s no going back.
Look at the example above: a trader placed an order to buy 100 shares and the price of the asset was $15.
In that precise moment of time, there are 2 sources of liquidity (availability):
The moment that the trader clicked buy at $15, the following scenarios could happen:
With market orders you never know what could exactly happen.
I know what you’re thinking: this sounds scary!
Yes, it does, but it’s not that bad as it sounds, we just presented all possible scenarios. In reality this depends on 2 different variables: liquidity and volatility.
In an extremely volatile market where prices can swing before we can blink our eyes then yes, we have no clue what price that market order can get us.
In a low liquidity asset then if no one is executing market orders and there are just a few pending orders on the exchange’s book then yes, we also could end up getting a horrible price. Maybe there were only 5 pending orders with a $2 difference in price each and our market order ate them all.
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Market orders are the simplest of all order types, placing them is as easy as opening your trading platform, choosing an asset, selecting the quantity of the asset and clicking either on buy or sell.
An example of placing a Market BUY order:
An example of placing a Market SELL order:
Remember, market orders are called like that because you get the MARKET price and you can never be sure which price it will be, specially on high risk conditions such as low liquidity and extreme volatility.
These are the main advantages of a market order:
The main disadvantage of a market order is:
That’s why this type of order regardless of it being simple requires understanding of the conditions where it’s being used to ensure you don’t go broke or watch your account disappear.
Remember, be careful with low liquidity and high volatility.
Market orders are commonly used when:
Remember, market orders are all about prioritising execution above price.
A good example of this would be:
Same example applies if you know that a stock you own will go down or the company will declare bankruptcy tomorrow and disappear, you don’t care the exact price you get, you just care about getting a price.
These are the most common market order mistakes (the first one is my personal favourite):
Hope this guide was helpful,
Enjoy!
Dec 07 2020
A trailing stop order is a dynamic stop order that maintains a pre-set maximum distance from the current price as long as it moves in the trader’s favour.
Dec 06 2020
A stop order is a market order to buy or sell that gets executed once an asset reaches a specific stop price defined by the trader.
Dec 03 2020
A Limit Order is a trading order created to automatically buy or sell an asset only at a specific price or better. Limit orders don’t guarantee execution.
Dec 01 2020
Stop-Loss Orders are meant to automatically limit a trader’s loss when prices go against his trade. Stop-Loss Orders work just like market orders.