Can There Be Partial Trade Fill Percentage?
"I place a trade, a limit order on a thinly traded stock. I want to buy 1000 shares at $10. The current price is $10.50. Someone places a market order for 500 shares. Another trader has a limit order for $10.10 for 400 shares. His order fills, and I get 100 at my price. I wait another day to see if I get any more shares. This is just an example of how it can work. I can place my order as ""all or none"" if I wish to avoid this."
Although this is possible with many brokers, it's not advisable. In many cases you may end up with both trades executed at the same time. This is because during the opening, the stock might spike up or down heavily, bid/ask spread widens, and both of your orders would get picked up, resulting in an instant loss. Your best bet is to place the stop manually sometime after you get filled. In practice, it would not work. If you put a bid in that was really out of line, even if it got filled, the exchange would reverse it.  Other than that it really depends on what the current bid/ask spread it, and what volume its trading, as well as how the market feels. Say the current bid is 11 and you put an order in with bid 11.5, it would soak up all the orders on the market up to the volume your buying. But once your order is filled the market will be determined by what the next order's bid/ask is. It might stay where you moved it too if others feels thats a fair price. But if every other order on the market is still at 11, then the price isnt gonna move.  tl;dl unless your a market maker, you could not realistically affect the price. You can do FOK on both market and limit orders. Normal market orders will partial fill if you want more shares than are being offered, or if someone pulled their order before you get there and now there are fewer shares than you placed a trade for. With a FOK limit order not at the BBO you are shooting in the dark for a quick match, most of the time it does not fill.  This is a commonly used order type for UHFT arbitrage.  Some exchanges will not attempt to cross it for a match if its price is not at, or better than the market price. When the FOK limit order is at the BBO it is essentially a FOK market order.   FYI: Sometimes you have a minimum quantity to fill option, so you can let the order sit on the book until it fills or you cancel. I have heard of this, but then the broker is short the shares if they weren't selling them out of inventory, so they still want to accumulate the shares or a hedge before EOD most likely - In that case it may not be the client themselves, but that demand is hitting the market at some point if there isn't sufficient selling volume.    Whether or not the broker ends up getting all of them below VWAP is a cost of marketing for them, how they expect to reliably get real size below vwap is my question. I understand the question, I think. The tough thing is that trades over the next brief time are random, or appear so. So, just as when a stock is $10.00 bid / $10.05 ask, if you place an order below the ask, a tick down in price may get you a fill, or if the next trades are flat to higher, you might see the close at $10.50, and no fill as it never went down to your limit.  This process is no different for options than for stocks.  When I want to trade options, I make sure the strike has decent volume, and enter a market order. Edit - I reworded a bit to clarify. The Black–Scholes is a model, not a rigid equation. Say I discover an option that's underpriced, but it trades under right until it expires. It's not like there's a reversion to the mean that will occur. There are some very sophisticated traders who use these tools to trade in some very high volumes, for them, it may produce results. For the small trader you need to know why you want to buy a stock or its option and not worry about the last $0.25 of its price. "You can choose to place successively lower buy limit orders, but whether they get filled or not is not a given; it depends on whether sellers care to accept your bid. In your example of a 49.98 / 50.01 spread, if you place a buy with limit of 49.99, it won't get filled (if the order reaches the market while still at 49.98 / 50.01) immediately, but will be added to the order book.  By being added to the order book, the markets bid and ask become 49.99 / 50.01.  Your order won't get filled until some seller places a market order or a sell limit order of 49.99 or less.  No guarantee that that will happen, and even if it does, there's nothing to say that your follow-up buy at 49.98 will ever be filled.  In fact, your 49.98 buy order queues up at the ""end of the line"" behind all previously pending 49.98 bids, since your order arrived after those other bids.  Since the initial conditions you supposed had a 49.98 bid, such an order exists (or at least did exist; it might have been cancelled in the intervening moment. Basically, your first buy at 49.99, if it happens, has essentially no influence on whether your second buy at 49.98 will happen.  You can't expect to move the market lower by making a bid that is higher (49.99) than the existing best bid (49.98).  Whatever influence your 49.99 order has is to raise the market's price, not lower it." My employer matches 6% of my salary, dollar for dollar. So you have a great benefit. The self-directed side has no fees but $10 trades. No option trading. Yours basically allows you to invest your own funds, but not the match. It's a restriction, agreed, but a good plan. where A1 is the number of trades. you may have to change the number 100 to 99 depending on how the 100th trade is charged. The idea is to use the if statement to determine the price of the trades. Once you are over the threshold the price is 14*number over threshold. "Assuming you are executing your order on a registered exchange by a registered broker, your order will be filled at the best bid price available.  This is because brokers are legally obliged to get the best price available. For example, if the market is showing a bid of 49.99 and an offer of 50.01 and you submit an order to offer 1000 shares at 5.00, your order will be filled at 49.99.  This is assuming the existing bids are for enough shares to fill all of the 1000 shares being offered.  If the share you are offering lacks the necessary liquidity to fill the order - i.e., the 49.99 bid is for less than 1000 shares and the ""level two"" bids are not enough to fill the remaining shares, then the order would be posted in the market as an offer to sell the balance (1000 - shares filled at 49.99 and those filled at level two bids) at 5.00.   I'm pretty sure that the scenario you are describing would be described as market manipulation and it would be against the law." While volume per trade is higher at the open and to a lesser extent at the close, the overall volume is actually lower, on average. Bid ask spreads are widest at the open and to a lesser extent at the close. Generally, bid ask spreads are inversely proportional to overall volumes. Why this is the case hasn't been sufficiently clearly answered by academia yet, but some theories are that First, a margin account is required to trade options.  If you buy a put, you have the right to deliver 100 shares at a fixed price, 50 can be yours, 50, you'll buy at the market. If you sell a put, you are obligated to buy the shares if put to you. All options are for 100 shares, I am unaware of any partial contract for fewer shares.  Not sure what you mean by leveraging the position, can you spell it out more clearly? "You need to negotiate with your broker to allow you to do more exotic order types.  One in particular I recommend is a ""hidden"" aka iceberg order.  You enter two numbers.  The first is the number of shares for your entire order, the second is the amount that will be displayed in the book (this is the tip of the iceberg, the remaining shares are hidden below the surface). The maker/taker rule applies as follows: The amount displayed will receive the rebate for providing liquidity.  The amount hidden will be charged the fee for taking liquidity. Example: You want to sell 10,000 shares total.  You enter a hidden order for 10,000 shares with 1,000 displayed.  On the level 2 screen traders will see 1,000 shares, and those shares will stay displayed there until the entire order is filled.  You receive a rebate for 1,000 shares, you pay the brokerage fee for 9,000 shares. Also, like one of the previous posters mentioned, only trade high liquidity stocks.  Large market cap companies with high volume.  This is why day traders love Tesla, Amazon, Netflix, etc. Large market cap, high volume, and high volatility.  Easy to catch $10+ moves in price. Hope this helps Happy trading" I doubt that this exists, but it could theoretically. After all, a share is kind of an option to a company's future success, and so a call is already a second level on indirection. The better approach would be to 'create your own Put-Puts', by investing less money (A) in the Put you wanted to invest into, and put the smaller rest (B) in the share itself or a Call. That way, if the original Put is successful, at max (B) is lost, and if it is unsuccessful, the loss on (A) is covered by a gain on (B). Potentially, if you do the math, you can reach a mathematical equivalent situation to a Put-Put by buying the right amount and kind of Calls. However, we know already that buying a Put and a Call is a poor strategy, so that would mean a Put-Put would also be a poor strategy. "Yes, almost always. I trade some of the most illiquid single stock options, and I would be absolutely murdered if I didn't try to work orders between the bid/ask.  When I say illiquid, I mean almost non-existent: ~50 monthly contracts on ALL contracts for a given underlying.  Spreads of 30% or more. The only time you shouldn't try to work an order, in my opinion, is when you think you need to trade immediately (rare), if implied volatility (IV) has moved to such a degree that the market makers (MM) won't hit your order while they're offering fair IV (they'll sometimes come down to meet you at their ""real"" price to get the exchange's liquidity rebate), or if the bid/ask spread is a penny. For illiquid single stock options, you need to be extremely mindful of implied and statistical volatility.  You can't just try to always put your order in the middle.  The MMs will play with the middle to get you to buy at higher IVs and sell at lower. The only way you can hope that an order working below the bid / above the ask will get filled is if a big player overwhelms the MMs' (who are lined up on the bid and ask) current orders and hits yours with one large order.  I've never seen this happen. The only other way is like you said: if the market moves against you, the orders in front of yours disappear, and someone hits your order, but I think that defeats the intent of your question." If the IRA is costing you $100 a year, you should almost certainly transfer it to a cheaper provider, regardless of whether you're going to withdraw anything.  You can transfer the IRA to another provider that doesn't charge you the fees.  Or you can convert it to Roth and combine it with your existing Roth.  Either way, you will keep all the money, and save $100 per year in the future. If you want to take money out of your retirement accounts, you should take it out of your Roth IRA, because you can withdraw contributions (i.e., up to the amount you contributed) from the Roth without tax or penalty. Whether you should withdraw anything from your retirement accounts is a different question.  If you're already maxing out your Roth IRA, and you have sufficient retirement savings, you could just instead plow that $5500 into your student loans.  (If you can afford it, of course, it'd be better to just pay the $7500 from your income and still contribute to the retirement accounts.)  There's no reason to withdraw from retirement accounts to pay loans when you could just divert current income for that purpose instead.