How Queued Orders Work Outside the Trading Window

Trading platforms offer numerous features to help automate and streamline the trading experience. One area often requested by users involves managing queued orders placed outside of the market’s active trading hours. This request for handling queued orders efficiently, particularly in relation to a trading window, is a topic that has been raised frequently in TradersPost office hours.

What Are Queued Orders?

Queued orders are those that are submitted when the market is closed or outside a specified trading window. They sit in a queue rather than being executed immediately. This functionality is crucial for traders who want to ensure their orders are executed as soon as the market opens or during a particular trading session.

At its core, queuing an order means the platform stores the trade request and automatically sends it for execution at the appropriate time—when the market opens or during a specified trading window.

Current Approach in TradersPost

As discussed during a recent TradersPost office hour session, queued orders are currently designed to accommodate brokers that don’t allow orders to be sent when the market is closed . For example, if a user submits a trade while the market is closed, TradersPost holds the order instead of sending it to the broker. Then, at the next available market opening, the queued order is dispatched to the broker for execution.

This prevents scenarios where orders would be rejected by brokers because they were submitted outside of normal trading hours. The system ensures that trades don’t simply fail but instead are queued and ready to be processed once conditions are favorable.

Expanding Functionality: Queued Orders and Trading Windows

A recent suggestion proposes a slight modification to how queued orders are handled, particularly focusing on making queued orders respect a defined trading window. This suggestion revolves around holding a trade that arrives outside the predefined trading window and only submitting it at the start of the next window .

While TradersPost already handles queuing for orders placed outside market hours, expanding this feature to include custom trading windows introduces complexities. Specifically, it would require real-time monitoring of each user’s trading window, triggering trades only when the trading window opens. Such a feature could be valuable for traders who follow specific session strategies, like those based on market openings or intraday trends.

However, implementing this feature could be tricky because it adds another layer of monitoring to the system. The platform would need to manage custom trading windows for potentially thousands of customers. Each user’s specific preferences would need to be accounted for, and the system would have to trigger trades at the beginning of each individual’s selected trading window, regardless of whether the market is globally open or closed.

Why Implementing This Feature Matters

Expanding the platform to allow users to queue orders based on custom trading windows would offer several advantages:

1. Increased Control: Traders can tailor their trades to specific timeframes, reducing the chance of execution during less favorable periods.

2. Reduced Rejections: By holding orders until the window opens, there’s a reduced risk of brokers rejecting orders placed outside of acceptable times.

3. Flexibility in Strategy: This feature could particularly benefit traders who operate on a global scale or use strategies based on specific market sessions, such as European open or Asian close strategies.

Conclusion

Managing queued orders and aligning them with custom trading windows is a logical next step in enhancing trading automation platforms like TradersPost. While implementing such a feature poses certain technical challenges, the benefits it provides in flexibility, control, and reduced risk make it a valuable addition for traders looking to optimize their strategies around specific market conditions.

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