Hello all Hope you are doing well!! I have had two incidents in the recent weeks where my stop loss didn't work upon the price reaching it. At first time my stop loss got triggered in the after hours, and I realised that my SL was not ticked to work outside normal market hours... So I fixed, but learnt that the only way to get my market stop loss to work outside of normal trading hours, I have to make it a limit stop loss. So I did that... the platform gave me a choice of choosing limit stop and normal stop for the same order. And I chose both at the same price. Lets say 3.42$ But it reached this price and nothing happened and the price went under this price (outside market hours) What am I doing wrong? Should there be a bit of a buffer between limit stop and stop loss? How do you deal with stop losses outside market hours?
I'm guessing the system detected two stops triggering simultaneously and voided them both as both cannot be executed. Or it detected the invalid stop, and voided all stops on that basis. My platform doesn't have the facility to restrict stops to certain times of day - it sounds a useful feature in theory - but clearly not in practice.
IB has defined so-called Regular Trading Hours (RTH) for certain financial instruments, but not for all. For those that do have it defined is there the option to allow or disallow triggering of orders outside RTH when placing an order in TWS. On top of that, TWS offers the setting what should be used as default: either have it by default allowed, or not allowed. For each order line is it possible to override this default setting when placing an order.
Stop Losses never work after hours and don't try price goes a bit crazy you'll get SL'd all the time for no reason. Being Gapped down in after / pre trade is sadly 1 of the costs, accept and move on.
If your stop loss does not work all time, then blame your platform. All my MT4,MT5 and my futures broker have stop loss order working at all time. Specifically, almost all my entries and exits are stop orders. And I trade at all time, often at midnight.
He's trading Stocks though, market runs for 1 hour before and after and is very low volume but huge price swings, index's / FX are 24/5 markets, stocks not.
The topic starter did not specify that he was trading stocks. The RTH setting which I described above applies also for futures.
Never seen / heard of Futures having after hours rules or requiring a Limit order to get in out, 99% sure that's just US Stock rules. OP trading stocks ??