MEGATHREAD: Limit Orders

Not sure it’s something I’d use. The only thing it really does is guarantee you’ll loose money on an investment that has dramatically reduced in price. For long term I think riding out the dips might end up being a better strategy in most cases. But not an expert, just how I see it.

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I agree a stop loss would great. Is there not one at the moment?

Yes for me this sort of functionality is essential before I can commit to placing more significant funds on the platform.

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You can vote for this feature over in the ideas section (I think the two could go together):

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Yes I feel the same about stop losses (including the not an expert bit!). They could in theory be used to prevent any kind of loss (you can set one after you’re making a profit after all, to stop it going into a loss at all), but retail investors are unlikely to use them that way and more likely to lose money IMO by using them - if you have a time horizon of 20 years, and you believe the stock you have invested in will last that long, there is little reason not to wait. The greatest sin of most retail investors (myself included) is probably trading too much, not too little.

So many concepts from mainstream investing are predicated on frequent trades with a time horizon of a few hours, days or weeks, and one of the few advantages a retail investor has is that you’re not focussed on quarterly numbers, and you simply don’t have to get out of a trade quickly, and you don’t have to deploy your money for maximum profit and avoid wasting time in the doldrums.

But everyone has a different style of investing, and there are many reasons you might want this. I quite like automated trading and would love to see other types of limit order. I tend to use limit orders more to buy than to sell, and never use stop loss personally, but if you’re going to do limit orders this is a simple addition.

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Hey Liam, @Chris has proposed this idea:

It would be a great feature to have, and is commended by Freetrade themselves:

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You can vote here.

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As much as I would also love to see limit orders, I am in fact asking for a stop loss order. Stop Loss vs. Stop Limit Order

Changed the category to ideas, you can vote now, thanks!

Stop loss and stop limit orders are intertwined and always exist in conjunction with each other. I don’t quite see the reason to have this idea in two separate topics.

If the feature will be introduced, it will certainly have bottom strike price to lock your gains by selling at the market price as soon as you hit the ‘no more risking’ value. And it will have a top limit price to sell your holdings at a certain value or more once the market price reaches it.

Unless I misunderstand something about the concept of stop loss and limit orders, I think having them separately is not necessary. Happy to be wrong :slight_smile:

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Your right it should be one topic, I think I just misunderstood, either way just to clarify I would like to see both stop loss and stop limit order…guess that’s what I was trying to say. I was just trying to emphasise the need for both. If there’s just a stop limit order at a predetermined price the stop-limit order is not guaranteed to be executed. Should the stock price rapidly decline past the stop-limit price and not recover, the order won’t be executed. That’s the downside with stop limit order. So yea if there’s gonna be both, I just read ‘Limit order’ and assumed otherwise.

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Personally I’d like freetrade to rethink this sort of thing anyway. There’s no need to be limited to the bizarre nomenclature and esoteric rules of existing systems. They could define a flexible set of rules that users can combine to do automated trading and expand it over time. For example sell if price goes under x within y days. It doesn’t have to be confusing and complex.

This could be a selling point for freetrade and something unique to them.

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Hey Vlad,

I’ve been number 1 in the queue for the last few days, have you gotten through the investor rounds yet? (I wasn’t in them)

That should mean you’ll be in the next batch to be added on Tuesday

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Thanks Emma :+1:

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I have one more request on this: please can you make limit orders independent of any market. Use market data to define rules, and get a quote to confirm that the market still matches the rule before executing. This would free you of any arbitrary restrictions imposed by markets and allow you to build rule sets which are unique to freetrade and apply to all investments. For example HL doesn’t offer limit orders on US stocks or ETFs, which is annoying.

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I think a basic, straight-forward limit order option (which can be implemented independently of other features like stop loss) is really important.

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See that dip just after 11am? That’s my limit order on a buy succeeding today. I placed it yesterday evening (with a different broker). If I’d used Freetrade, there might not even have been a dip today, and I’d probably have paid around 783+ instead of 779. When you’re buying lots of shares, those few pennies difference in price really add up.

I’ve been planning to place a really big order via Freetrade, but I don’t think I can until limit orders are implemented.

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I think this would be a really useful feature to include in the app, you could set it to only work with instant orders and gain additional revenue as well.

Keep it simple and enhance to include other limit options as and when

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Is there any news on using stops/limits?
Last I saw was a post from 2018 saying it was on the roadmap - but I can’t see it on the roadmap at the moment.
Trading 212 has this as well as IPOs and more stocks, so I’m struggling to see why to stick with Freetrade…

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I’ve moved your post over to this thread, which is the place to get all of the updates about limit orders.

They’re not on the roadmap right now but we’re are still planning to add them in the future.