Order States Explained
Order state is the part of trading automation most likely to be modelled as a boolean and most likely to punish that — starting with the fact that a successful response is not a fill.
Tag
execution
Every StaxInvesting article tagged execution · 12 posts.
12 articles
Position Reconciliation in Automated Trading
Reconciliation is the least glamorous part of trading automation and the one that separates a system that works from one that works until it does not.
Multi-Leg Orders Explained
The structure you intend and the order you submit are different things — and multi-leg execution is exactly where the gap between them causes damage.
Why Orders Get Rejected
For automation, rejections are diagnostic rather than catastrophic — provided the system knows which ones are worth retrying and which will never succeed no matter how often you ask.
Partial Fills in Automated Trading
For a person watching a screen a partial fill is a minor annoyance. For automation it is a state divergence, and the error compounds through every subsequent decision rather than staying contained.
Time in Force Explained
Time in force is the order parameter most often left at whatever the platform defaults to — and it is the only one that says what happens when an order does not fill.
Market Order vs Limit Order
Almost every order-type question in trading reduces to this one — and the two failure modes are opposite in a way that determines which belongs where.
Bid-Ask Spread Explained
The spread is the least discussed and most consistently paid cost in trading, because it never appears on a statement as a fee — and it is the only liquidity measure that is actually current.
What Is Slippage?
Slippage is the reason a strategy can be profitable in a backtest and unprofitable in an account — and it is largest in exactly the conditions that produce a strategy's biggest moves, which is when a fixed assumption is most wrong.
Why Two People Copying the Same Trade Get Different Fills
Platforms describe this as a minor caveat. It is the mechanism that determines whether a good provider produces good follower outcomes — and if a strategy's edge is thinner than its replication cost, it is profitable for the provider and not for you.
Order Types for Automated Execution: Which Ones Actually Fit
Market, limit, stop, and stop-limit are the core order types, and choosing among them is a tradeoff between certainty of fill and certainty of price. Automation changes the calculus, because software cannot watch a resting order and improvise the way a human can. This explains each order type honestly, including the ways stops do not work the way people assume, and which fit automated execution.
Latency in Options Order Routing: What Actually Matters
Trading platforms love to advertise speed, sub-millisecond this, ultra-low-latency that. For most retail options trading, those milliseconds are noise relative to the costs that actually determine your outcomes: the bid-ask spread you pay on every trade and the slippage you take in bad conditions. This separates the latency that matters from the latency that is marketing, including a trap in how speed is measured.