Your trade has gone against you and you've put in a market order to get out. What's the worst fill you've gotten and on what stock? In my thus-far brief trading career, it was MMM. As I recall it was around .35 or so away from the last price I saw on my Time and Sales before I hit the execute button.
Of course it was MMM, since you are expressing it in pennies and not as a percentage (and you are not trading BRK.A). The worst market order fill I ever got was in August of 2001 around 9:32 Eastern when trying to buy about 1500 shares of ORCL. It was about $0.90 away from the market price when I entered the order. If you translate that to the levels MMM is trading these days (pre-split), it would be about $8 per share. This was when I learned never to use market orders. (There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but "The trade is going against me and I just HAVE TO get out" is not one of them.)
OUCH! Sorry to bring back painful memories, but what did you do after you got filled/raped like that? Since you don't use market orders anymore, do you instead try to limit hit a price 10 cents away from the best now? More?
Geez, that's a pretty extreme example! That was a "simulated" market order, I take it? Man, I'd be pretty pissed about that. On ORCL, or any liquid Naz, why not just put a limit in, say, .50, from the market? Surely you'd get filled. I've had a couple of stop orders (nyse) filled for .50 lower than the market, which sucked, but that's the way it goes. Overall, I don't think market orders are that bad and to be filled more than 1% away from the market is pretty unlucky, imo. But I guess if you daytrade you should count on it happening.
ROFL......True story here! My first day of trading. Bought BAX on the open. News came out on the open also and it fell 3.5 points by the time I got filled. 5 minutes on a mkt order after I placed it. Luckily it was only 100 shares. I tried to fight it because of the length of time on the fill for a lousy 100..........."stock ahead" was the response. That was my birth by fire to trading.
From then on, I traded mostly 100 share lots. I try to avoid a situation in which I would "have to" use a market order altogether. If it happens, I submit a marketable limit order. On a stock like MMM it might be more than $0.50 away from the best price. It was one of those "discount brokers" offering "free" market orders. Those were the days.
Around this time last year when THC blew up. I knew not to put a market order in a stock cratering like that, so I was sending and re-sending limit orders 50 cents, then a full dollar below the bid, still with no fill. Buy the time the stock halted (still no fill) I was down 9 points. It opened later the same day at about the same price, where I exited. Thank god it was only a couple hundred shares, there were some real horror stories from that one (and some monstrous wins). In hindsight, I would have done better to send a market order and take probably 5 dollars of slippage.
You guys lived charmed lives. In the old SOES days, it was common for a stock to run many points before a 'market order' would get filled. Try selling IOMEGA when it went into freefall in those days (Nasdaq). The markets are much 'fairier' these days and there's more liquidity under stress, mostly due to ECN's.
Early 80's, I'm long 10 spoos off the floor with a stop market in place for "protection." I don't recall the news event if there was one, but the market dropped 2-3 handles in about 30 seconds. I mean total vacuum. Of course my order became active and filled near the low. Less than 5 minutes later the market had recovered nearly all of its loss. I hadn't though. I have to laugh now because this was the same method I used to trade as a local on the floor fairly soon afterwards. No charts, no tape, just the numbers.