Today about 12:36 pm I put in a buy stop order (to cover my shorts) at 903.5 ib takes it at a market order. the price never hit 903.5. Why did this happen? I called them and they said since i scaled out previously with out placing a new order for the buy stop (just clicking on the line in ib's platform) it averaged my buystop order hence it got triggered on Now wtf is that? The rep told me that i should cancel my order line in the platform and put in a new order if I did not want this to happen. Are they fucking stupid? Did this ever happen to anybody? Since when do they average trades.
This is odd but similar cases happened to me with IB market orders by getting filled 3 ticks outside of the bid-ask range to my disadvantage!? I just let it go at that time. I've heard they do some market making as well but I am not going to speculate further. For your case, you may still need to check the high frequency (1sec) historical data for bid, ask, and traded prices around the time stamp of your fill. There is always a possibility that the ask price was dislocated temporarily to trigger your stop and pulled back to fill your order at a lower price....Just a thought.
spoke with a rep again and he explained it like this. He told me that first I had a stop limit under the market price then I moved it up to 903. He then told me that the original stop price was already triggered and now its a limit order. So when i moved up my stop limit price I was actually just moving up a limit order above the market and then it got filled right away. But what I don't understand is if my original stop got triggered then my order should have filled right away. I usually set my stop limit prices as the same price. I did check the time stamp and no order was above 902.75 during this whole mess up.
It does not make sense to me. A typical sell order ticket has a (mkt or stop) order to sell the market + two child orders connected through an OCA group (One Cancels All). To cover your short, you have a stop limit order to take profit OR a stop loss order to cover your short with a loss. Once triggered, the later is always an immediate "Market" order and not a limit order. Your stop loss order should have been triggered as a market order unless you have set it up (probably accidentally) as stop limit order. One suggestion is to take a look at the attached order ticket configured as a bottom on the IB chart which creates an OCA group on the fly with a stop loss order triggered as Market order. P.S., keep an eye on IB fills in the future. There are some anomalies to watch for.
No necessarily. When the stop price is reached it becomes a limit order. If price gaps above the limit price, the order will not be filled.
I was thinking this might have been the possibility but during this time frame prices were not jumping around too much. Anyway ib should have some kind of way when the stop price is hit and you want to change the order the tws platform should have it grayed out or something like that so users can know that they have to cancel the current order and submit a new one. vita I don't use order tickets I just right click on the symbol to place a trade. and your right it was a stop loss order bec. I was already in the red. In any event I shorted again that day @898 and rode it down till 878. I just lost some profits during the time period of the mishap.