I've just begun expanding my understanding of order types past the standard market- / limit- / stop- orders (mostly since IB offers about 20x as many types as my prev discount brokerage), and want to make sure I'm not about to expose myself to risks b/c of unusual bid/ask activity on market open. Example: SP is $25 and I create a Market-if-Touched BUY order for 1,000 shares at $24.50. I often notice that when I check pre-market bids/asks they're all over the map...sometimes 25% higher or lower than what they end up actually being on open. I've been told to just ignore pre-market #'s, since they're not "real"...but that's kind of what I want to make sure isn't going to screw me here. Is there any risk that the irregularity of the pre-market activity results in a wacky first few seconds of trading, whereby some abnormally high or low trade actually gets executed or otherwise 'makes it through'? In a nutshell, I'm basically trying to assess the 'safety' of these order types to make sure I don't get some terrible execution price on a large trade due to weird opening activity on a stock that has only modest daily volume (~300K). All it would take is one irregularly-priced trade getting executed to trip a 5-figure order on my part, so I'm being cautious. Am I thinking about this correctly, and are there other safeguards I should place? Only ones I could think of are: i) Using a Limit-if-Touched or some other Limit- order type...won't go into detail, but I think I'd rather use a Market type for various reasons. ii) I think IB will let me activate an order like this only during certain hours? So maybe I instruct it to only be active from 9:33am to 4:00pm...? Thanks, hope I was clear enough above; a little new to these and trying to learn.