Because I have a daytime job, I often place buy and sell orders outside market hours. Mostly it's ok but sometimes I get a bad price that seems 5% away from what I expected.
Should orders only be made during market hours so you can trade in real time?
thanks
A grizzled veteran of the NHS
Sometimes there can be wide pricving at the open, which might be waht you have experienced depending on your platform.
One way around this would be to use limit orders to target the price you are expecting as you indicated in your post. This does however run the risk of your order not being executed if the price moves away from your limit.
Dealing during the day you can usually get a firm quote indicating the price which you then usually have about 10 or 15 seconds to accept or not if it is acceptable to you. So that may be the answer for you.
Hope this helps.
I use limit orders here too if i want to trade early in the day, but usually avoid the first 30 minutes of trading in small caps/aim as liquidity can be worse than later on i think.In the us you can trade pre and post market if you're broker offers this, which i always thought unfair to some.But depending on the company's market cap trading volumes can be thin and there can be some dodgy tactics used by some.A few US lised securities now trade 24 hours a day and i think that's the way the US market might be heading.It makes sense apart from liquidty issues as a lot of the world trades in the US and it's all computer/algo matched.Always useful to check average volume and liquidity.Have you downloaded your broker's smartphone app?I use that fairly often when i want to see what the share price is doing during the day and i'm interested in buying some shares but out of the house.
placing orders outside market hours is making your life hard - opening price next day is not the same as closing price the prior day for almost an unlimited number of reasons. Random example if same sector similar company updates market and says trading has taken fund for worse all similar stocks could easily be affected even though they have no news. So if you want to pay close to quoted price stick to trading during working hours - limit orders probably a better bet if you are outside market hours at least that way you won’t overpay
I've just checked the spread on Apple and Nvidia stocks, its 0.006 percent for Apple and 0.03 for Nvidia. I doubt the spread will change much for the US markets within the first 30 mins of markets opening, but I'll check later. The US markets open from 2.30pm to 9pm GMT, so as you have a day job(thanks for the all the amazing work that you NHS staff do btw, saved my life a decade ago :), this may be the preferred option. In trading US markets, need to factor in exchange rates GBP/USD; its been fairly stable in the last year which is good, at least the GBP isn't falling vs the dollar as it was in most of 2022.
I'm itching to start trading the US markets, but prices currently look extended to me for the big stocks. Happy to wait patiently for a big correction, or next bull market.
As for the UK, you can always trade during lunch time? Spreads should be tighter due to lower volatility as traders need to eat too.
one attraction for us stocks is that there seems to be high variability ref pricing over time - i remember looking at facebook (sorry Meta) for example price had dropped from $370 to sub $150 on poor sentiment not so long back - price is now back at $500. Ok its probably easy with hindsight to say that facebook wasnt really going down the pan any time soon - presumbaly there was some logic for peeps selling down when the price had a mini collapse - i didnt end up buying so that says the hindsight did have niggles.
If one pays close close attention there will always be some stocks where ratings are more reasonable compared to historic norm even if other stocks are on a roll. Eg if you look at paypal think that only on pe of 11 for next year - perhaps that company may have had its heyday but its still expecting 10% plus turnover increases in 2025 (i dont hold that either).
Tesla another example where price is over 50% down from highs - although compared to earnings Tesla chucks out at the share price highpoint it probably was big ask to say Tesla was worth 90 * pe. Whilst i think that price deffo was toppy wouldnt surprise me if when sentimnet turns price ended back up there if company keeps delivering.
