The only diff between an OPG order and a non-OPG order is that the OPG order will auto-cancel if not filled at the open (because its limit price was not marketable against the opening price). Most specs will give you the open for small orders sent up until a few seconds before he prints the open, but you can't rely on that. 09:27 ET or earlier is probably safe.
NYSE does not pass on a specialist bill to your clearing firm for limit orders filled on the openning print. So you may ask why your execution is gettng charged as billable.
Just mark the order OPG for opening only...and, as mentioned earlier, you'll have the order canceled if not filled. Should be no Spec fee for openings. Don
I submitted all my 14 orders for AMEX listed stocks with a GAT of 9:25 AM today. As expected, they became active and were routed to ISLAND on time. They were NOT rerouted to AMEX prior to 9:30 AM as I hoped even though I checked the Pre-open re-route option. Nine of the orders were routed to AMEX several seconds after 9:30 AM. The strategy which I am trading captures the few elusive trade opportunities of some carefully chosen ultra low liquidity stocks. I don't want to miss the opening trade when one does occur. I also don't want to miss any other opportunity throughout the day. I'm afraid that if I route directly to AMEX and leave my order there that I'll miss any other trade opportunity that hits my limit on a non-AMEX exchange throughout the day. I also can't be in front of my computer for the market open evey day to redirect all my orders to SMART routing. Well, I guess that you can't have everything that you want, huh? It just makes me feel bad watching one of my relatively rare profit opportunities slip by by missing market open trades when they occur on one of my stocks. Any ideas why the pre-open re-route didn't work since my order was active on ISLAND just after 9:25 AM?
You need to ask IB. Give them the specific order details. If the reroute is supposed to happen at 09:27 (is it?), there seems to be a problem. Presumably, the ones that it rerouted to AMEX after 09:30 were the result of the SMART router seeing AMEX as the best offer and attempting to put you where the nearest seller was, as expected. Can you give an example of the stock, prices, and orders you're talking about? I can't quite see what opportunity you think you might miss, unless the spreads are very wide, in which case you might be able to use OCA or conditional orders to get there.
Alanm, Thanks for taking an interest in my situation. Although today's orders weren't re-routed as a result of my use of the pre-open re-route option, I didn't miss any opportunities "today" to provide an example. So, here is an example of one of my recent missed opportunities as a result of not capturing the open (prior to knowing about the re-route option)... A good example occurred with stock IHM on 8-10-06. 1600 shares traded at the market open at $9.70. I had 3 GTC SELL orders in place to close my open position at a profit totaling 1700 shares at limits of $9.68, 9.67, and 9.66. SMART routed my order to ISLAND just after 9:30 AM. The high for IHM has been 9.67 since that transaction and volume has been light. I would have sold 1600 of my 1700 shares if my order wasn't vacationing on ISLAND at the market open. I've actually missed other similar opportunitities in the past with larger missed profits. P.S... I routinely use OCA orders to "fish" for my opening positions in these illiquid issues. Thanks again for your interest. I hope this clarifies my problem and perhaps makes it easier to suggest a solution. I was already thinking about asking IB what happened to my re-route. I had already asked them about missing the market open previously and they didn't mention the availability of the re-route option to me when I had tried to ask them what to do.
I realize that you're AMEX bashing, but... Are you serious or just kidding? If you're serious, would you explain?
Call me cynical but I think if you had put opening sell orders into AMEX for IHM at 9.68, 9.67, and 9.66, the specialist would have opened it at 9.65.