One more small oddity, not a big deal but good to know so that you don't panic.
I placed an order to buy 500 shares of CREAF at the bid. Got em' too, by the way, we'll ignore the fact that it eventually droped from this price. :) But the bid was still unchanged when I got the shares.
I got 300 of them, and the order momentarily disappeared from Island. It took maybe 30 seconds for the order for the remaining 200 to reappear on Island.
Question: when this happens, does the remaining part of the order retain it's priority, or does it go to the back of the queue? Since my order was the only one on Island at that price, I couldn't tell.
You have to be very patient, but you CAN snag shares at the bid, just check Island first to see if anyone is in line. If not, you have a good chance, even when things are slow, as you'll match the next market sell order.
I'm not normally this "cheap" but it made sense, since I was re-establishing a position I'd sold out at a higher price. I suspected it might pull-back more, but wanted to reestablish some position. The market was slow at the time, and didn't look like it would get away on the up-side, but I was fundamentally bullish and didn't want to be left out completely. So I went for 1/2 position at the bid to get my foot back in. The spread gave a bit of a cushion if it turned out that I was initially right about my judgement that it would pull back somewhat more - essentially I wound-up paying what I felt the offer would be at the full pull-back.
I stress patience when doing this - it took about 1/2 hour to get those 500 shares. |
