Why Didn't My Limit Order Fill When the Price Touched It?

You placed a buy limit at 42.00. The chart shows a low of exactly 42.00. Your order is still open, or it expired at the close with nothing done.

That is normal. It happens to every trader who uses limits, and the reason is almost always one of a handful of things you can check in a few minutes.

Orders at one price wait in a line

Most US exchanges match orders by price first and time second. At any single price, the orders that arrived earlier get filled before the ones that arrived later, so if two thousand shares were bid at 42.00 ahead of your hundred and only fifteen hundred shares traded there before the price bounced, the orders ahead of you absorbed every share and yours never reached the front.

The low on the chart is one print. It shows that some shares changed hands at 42.00, possibly just one small lot, and it cannot show where you stood in the queue.

Exchanges differ in the details. Some venues give priority to displayed orders over hidden ones, and some have other allocation rules, but price and then arrival time is the common pattern. A Level 2 quote shows how much size sits at each price on the venues it covers, which gives you a rough sense of how long the line was when you joined it.

A touch you could never have filled

Several kinds of print reach your chart without your order being eligible for them.

• Odd lots. Trades under 100 shares are reported to the tape and many charts plot them. A tiny trade at your price can set the low while the size in front of you barely moves.
• Other venues. Your order rests where your broker routed it. A print elsewhere at your price does not reach into that book.
• Quote versus trade. If you were watching the bid touch 42.00, that was a quote. A buy limit fills when a seller trades with it.
• Wrong side. A buy fills against sellers at the ask. Watching the bid while you are buying, or typing a sell when you meant a buy, will look like a missed fill.

Time in force and session settings

A day order stops working at the end of the regular session. If the stock drifted down to your price at 5:30 in the evening, a day order was already gone, and a print on an after-hours chart would have looked like a missed fill when the order simply no longer existed. Check the time in force on the order record, because good-till-canceled, day and extended-hours variants behave differently, and brokers label them in their own ways.

The same goes for the start of the day. A limit that is only eligible for the regular session ignores anything the stock does in pre-market trading.

Some brokers also cap how long a good-till-canceled order lasts. Check yours.

A worked queue

The chart low says 42.00. Your order was still 200 shares from the front of the line when the selling stopped, and the whole gap between the print on the chart and the fill you did not get is exactly that shortfall. Had sellers traded 850 shares instead, you would have received 50 of your 100, which is the case covered in what happens when an order partly fills.

What to look at in your order history

Open the order detail. Go down this list:

1. Status. Open, expired, canceled or rejected?
2. Limit price and side. Exactly what you meant?
3. Time in force. Day, good-till-canceled, extended hours?
4. Session eligibility. Regular hours only?
5. Timestamps. When did the order go live, and when did the touch happen?
6. Time and sales. How many shares traded at your price after your order was live, and were they round lots?

If the touch came after the order expired, the answer is on line three. If thousands of shares traded at your price while your order was live and eligible, and you still got nothing, that is worth a question to your broker’s trade desk, since it is one situation where a routing or handling problem could be the cause.

When a fill matters more than the last cent, pay the extra cent. When it does not, a limit that sometimes misses is the price of the discipline, and the missed trade costs you nothing but the opportunity.