a little help with limit orders...

This is probably a stupid question but I want to make sure that I really understand it.

At Oanda, when you place a Buy or Sell stop you also have to set two boundaries, these two boundaries represent what kind of price are you willing to take in case they can't fill you at the price you originally set on your order.

So, what is really a buy/sell stop order? A market order is when I tell my broker that I want to enter right now, so I'm taking the risk of getting a bad fill since my broker's going to fill me at the next best price available, and if that price is 20 pips away from my entry (just an example) then I'll get a 20 pips slippage. I thought limit orders were supposed to prevent me from getting a bad fill. If Oanda is asking me to set those two boundaries, it would mean that slippage can happen, even it's not a market order.

Bottom line of the question: Is the execution of a limit order really any different from the execution of a market order? I'm thinking that if I can get slippage on my limit order, then a limit order is just a regular market order which will be executed in the future. Right now my conclusion is that both orders are facing the same kind of problem (slippage), and the only difference is that with the market order I'm facing slippage right now, and with the limit orders I'll just face slippage later.

Is there any sense in what I just said, or am I totally wrong?

One more thing: is this boundaries thing something exclusive from Oanda, what about other brokers?

Thanks for your time to read my post.

There are four types of entry orders. A buy limit is a buy order that you place below the current market price. A buy stop is a buy order that you place above the current market price. A sell limit is a sell order that you place above the current market price. A sell stop is a sell order that you place below the current market price.

The "Lower Bound" is the lowest you are willing to buy/sell at. The "Upper Bound" is the highest you are willing to buy/sell at.

These upper and lower bounds basically allow you to specify a range you are willing to buy/sell in case the price moves after it touches your limit price.

If you don't want to use them you can uncheck those boxes. You will get filled at your limit price or not at all.

Oanda calls it Bounds other brokers calls it "At Best"

Thanks Turbokaos, that's what I wanted to know.

I would start my own new thread but that seems to be disallowed for new members so I am having to add to what I think is a similar thread.
Sorry if this is not the right thread to ask this on but I am trying to get a simple script for a limit order based on the current Ask price to work for the FTSE 100. I can get a script to work that says buy limit at Ask-1 but when i try Ask-0.5 it doesnt work. The Ask minus whole nimbers works, fractions don't.
Any help woild be very gratefully received
Thanks

PS Moderators, If this is an unsuitable thread to post to please would you move my comment to the right thread, many thanks.

What is the tick size for the ftse? You have to enter a valid number relative to tick size. The other possible cause is the stoplimit - is there a minimum distance from price that the limit must be set at? This varies for different brokers.
The order entry screen should give you the error message.
ps: Before doing this in a script, use the order entry screen to see if it is accepted and if not get the error message.
Then in your script, use the lasterror function.

Hi Kenz987

Many thanks for taking the time to reply. The FTSE 100 tick size is 0.5 points for the future however I am using MT4 with a spread betting company and they trade in fractional ticks of 0, 0.3, 0.5, 0.8.
Your reply has prompted me to look click on the "experts" tab and there I can see the problem. The script I wrote said deduct say 0.2 from the current ask. If say the ask was 5680 then unfortunately the price that it is coming up with is 5679.80000000 rather than the 5679.8 that I wanted which is causing the problem.
So I guess I need to set the number of decimal places to what is aceptable. It says invalid price for ordersend function.
Can you help me please to get the number of decimal places to the right number please?

Problem solved, I found that I need to use normalizedouble. I tried using Digits, but the problem was that I was testing the script on a demo a/c that didnt have any decimal places on the chart. When I tried on live trading a/c the limit order worked.
Thanks anyway for getting me to look in the xperts window
Cheers

Use NormalizeDouble
(I think - don't have my editor open at the moment).