exactly - the point and it says so right in the fine print of every account document. i can see OP long during 911 saying but i had muh stop in mommie.
Do you have a margin account or a cash account? Why not show your example of how you placed your stop, what trigger you have set and any further details. The red flag to me is that you say you have two stops that were not triggered.
Back to the OP. If there is a Sell restriction, you cannot sell. It does not matter if you have a position. Likewise with a Buy restriction (more rare). Think of it as a partial halting. There are steps that have to occur for an order to fill and along the way things can happen. Orders can be rejected by the broker (margin, frozen account), by the exchange (restrictions, halting, lock limits), and then the order has to get matched up (last in que, disorderly market, illiquidity). Please understand this before it costs you too much "education". These are ONLY a few things, and there are more. Also when these things happen, things usually are a bit "crazy". We are not even getting into options , bonds, forex, swaps, etc. Others can add to the list. Here is an example one might get into: You go long a stock @ 2.00 for 4000 shares. News is released, BAD news. BEFORE a sell restriction or halting, you put in SELL MKT, 2000 shares. Your order is accepted, but just 1/2 a second before, some larger entity put in a MKT sweep to fill SELL order to sell 2 million share. Another entity also has an MKT order for another 1 million same order type, 1/4 second before you. Now the stock tanks to 0.30, as you see it. But along the way the first 2 million market had trouble filling. It partial fills, then stops filling, partial fills again, stops filling again. Ditto with the next million shares, but it stops with 10% not filled. Now people see this, and there are literally no Bids, no buyers at 0.30. The stock halts. Your order did not fill and you are locked out. And a variant, what if you get margin called and the stock is halted? Again, this has to be in your plan otherwise you are just another newbie. There are many ways to mitigate this risk.
Kids, you are all talking about absolutely extreme events and yes if there is no bid in the market then a sell won't get filled. Why even mention that. It is a given. A market sell order to close or reduce an open position (uptick rules only apply to short selling) will ALWAYS get filled if there are bids in the market and if the stock trades (is not halted) and if the next bid is not so far away from the previous trade that it will be designated as a irrational price change that causes brokers to withhold the order from submission. Those are the ONLY events where a market order would not get filled. Really, let's stop talking about the obvious. Large price deviations are very well defined by the sec, a broker cannot just say that it withheld a market order because it deemed a priced change of 0.3% an irrational price deviation. The entire point of this thread was under the assumption that the market trades orderly and that a stop order that triggered did not get filled. How hard is that to comprehend?
In these cases, I believe the order would be REJECTED, and not just 'sitting there,' without being filled.
Rejected is great so you can move on and place other order, but sometimes it does not and limbo occurs. Of course one can try next time someone sets off a NBC device, or some thing happens in Balkans or straits of Taiwan. That is why they call it a "disorderly market". Thing that should happen don't and things that should not happen do. Of course it is moot since anyone can "think" what they want, act how they want, with their own account. (absolutely no offense intended here) I just know being through it many times, I know how I am going to handle my account risk. At IB, I have been in Light Blue, Pale Purple, Purple, Pink and Orange (Limbo) status many times way longer than expected. Order Status Colors (interactivebrokers.com)
My Td Ameritrade has an order called “stop market.” That’s guarantee to fill base on a price you put in even on a gap up or gap down. For example let say you put on a sell stop market order for a stock xyz @ $19 and the next day it gap down to $15. It will fill it at $15
I'm sure it is not the case. There is NEVER a guarantee on a stop but you state "next day" above. That is not a stop market. A stop market is to execute immediately when a trigger is hit. Brokers have obligations not to move the market. If the stock's last trade was $19 and bids disappear to $5 bid, TD would have some serious explaining to do if they allowed the market to move down 73% on one small trade. Read their terms. I'd be willing to bet they do not say guarantee and include something to the tune of "best efforts". In regards to the OP's question. We are sitting here speculating on large gaps and other extreme situations when we have not seen details of the placement of the order, the trigger, the stock, the time, etc. IB's last metrics show 1.76 million DARTs per day in October. They must have thousands of stops per day and the OP seems to be a rarity stating his stop order wasn't honored. I thus think it is reasonable to jump to the conclusion this is operator error. I could be wrong but without knowing the exact details on how the order was submitted we may never know.