Hey - if you use TOS, then be aware that my "market order" to buy took 20 minutes to fill, even though I told it to cancel when I saw it was acting slow. So 20 minutes later, I suddenly get a fill, and meanwhile, they said it was too late to cancel. So now here I sit, with a 'sell at market' to get out, and it's been sitting there for almost 20 minutes now, and I'm racking up losses. Down $900 so far and still going down, and I can't get out. Phone lines go unanswered today. Chat room full of people now saying they are stuck in trades. Meanwhile, their live-trading show on ShadowTrader, is executing trades, so makes you wonder if he even uses their platform.
I've heard TOS is problematic for scalping futures. Not sure what you're trading though. I use TOS for equity/options/funds but not futures.
I was doing a daytrade on equities, SINA. My at market sell just filled, over 20 minutes later. I'm down $422. I also trade futures on their system. I used to trade forex, but had the exact thing happen last spring, so I quit using them for all forex.
1. You can't cancel a market order. 2. The slow fill probably stems from the ax not the agent. 3. When using market orders, particularly pertaining to liquidty (volume and spread) slippage should come as no surprise. 4. Hitler found Jews quite convenient to blame.
I would total agree that you can't execute a 'cancel' on 'market' order. But when you don't get a long fill after a while, and you suspect something is wrong, then an attempt to cancel would certainly be in order. Since no fill, then what other way would there be to get out of a non-existent trade? You can't sell a non-existent long position. If you do sell, then how do you know you aren't going short when their platform is out-to-lunch? You don't know they are goofed when you place the original trade. The only feed back you get is 'nothing'. So what would you do in this situation? Sell a long that, as far as you can tell, never filled? As soon as I got confirmation, 20 minutes later that I did fill my long buy, then I did enter a sell.
I have had much worse problems with some brokers and clearing firms I have used during my 39 years of trading. The really bad ones I am quick to remember were with UBS, Southwest Securities, JPR Capital, Penson Financial Services, RJT.com, and Fidelity. Open a account with IB and you should be OK as long as Tom Peterffy owns and runs IB.
your orders were held in your computer. 20 minutes later, your computer hated u for surfing in the internet unrestricted sites and released your market orders through the broker server and onto the exchange server in a flash. P.S Market order is not programmed to accept any cancel command