Stock MisTrades

What Should You Do If You Mistrade?

In stock trading, a mistrade is a trade which looks like a mistake, acts like a mistake and smells like a mistake. In other words, it is considerably outside the market price of other trades that were being made at the same time.

An example of a mistrade would be if a day trader was logged into his or her E*TRADE account, or their Scott Trade account, and messed up when ordering stocks. Say that Google is currently trading for $500 per share, and they want 1000 shares. If they placed an order for 1000 shares, but set the buy price to $5,000 per share, then that would be an obvious mistrade. No one in their right mind would expect them to have to really pay 5 million dollars for something that is currently trading for half a million dollars.

In the event of a mistrade, a trader should immediately contact the trading helpdesk with the service they use, and identify the mistrade. If they wait more than 30 minutes, they may end up having to pay for it, because the money will have been moved and the seller could have moved on to buy bigger and better things. Day traders, who are worried about making mistrades, should make sure they have talked to their online trading helpdesk before they start trading, so that they know what to do in the event that they do make a mistake while day trading and need to fix it... Fast! (This also applies to people who trade in foreign rate exchange and other online trading platforms.) Stocks forum | Online Scheduler