DiamondEcho wrote:I've no idea whether the broker you use accepts market orders only, or limit orders too, but be aware that even with limit orders your order will be there to see for all who have Level-2* visibility of the entire order book. If you put in a materially large (vs daily volume) sell order, 'your tooled-up rivals' will see it, and at the least your order might set a near-term price-ceiling just below you, and risk the price running away below.
Actually, that's broker-dependent as well. It's only necessarily true if you have a Direct Market Access (or "DMA") account, which enables you to input orders directly into the Stock Exchange's systems. Such accounts are rare, among other reasons because they are (or at least were when I last looked, which is a few years ago) only available to clients who are classified as more than just ordinary "retail clients". I don't think it's especially difficult to get oneself classified that way, at least if one has reasonably substantial investments and is willing to put a bit of time and effort into qualifying for the classification. But it does involve asking for it, and it does involve giving up some of the protections that apply to ordinary "retail clients", so I suspect relatively few people get DMA accounts... Certainly I could easily qualify for one, but I've never bothered!
Otherwise, it depends how the broker processes limit orders. Some probably do just input them into the Stock Exchange's systems, but I'm pretty certain that others keep them in their own systems, which monitor the share price and try to execute the order if and when it appears to have a good chance of executing. Details vary as to how they determine whether it has a good chance of executing, how they try to execute it is and when they think it does have a good chance, and how they deal with the situation if it nevertheless fails to execute.
One giveaway that a broker does not input limit orders into the Stock Exchange's systems is the presence of terms like the following from
Halifax's terms and conditions:
"
19.5 When you ask us to place a limit order you agree that we will not make the details of such limit order publicly available."
Another giveaway that they probably don't is if they provide order types that the Stock Exchange's systems don't provide, such as 'stop-loss' orders (or at least they didn't provide them when I last looked). Basically, they
have to keep such orders on their own systems and monitor share prices until the conditions for the order look to have been fulfilled, then try to execute them - and once they've made their own systems capable of doing that, it's trivial to make them able to handle the relatively simple conditions for limit orders as well.
Gengulphus