Some Bracket Orders Don’t Have Stop Loss

Alpaca Trading
1

I have created a paper trading account and this morning submitted a large batch of bracket orders. For every order I submitted a take profit limit price and stop loss stop price as per the API requirements.

For all orders the take profit limit sell order has been submitted. But, for quite a few of the orders, there is no stop loss sell order submitted.

Does anybody know what could cause this or has anybody else experienced this? Not sure if it’s a bug.

2

Typically when a bracket order is submitted both the limit and stop loss orders will be in a ‘held’ status. They aren’t actually submitted for execution until the initial parent order fills. At that time, the limit order is submitted for execution and will then have a status of ‘new’. The stop loss order will remain with a status of ‘held’ until it is triggered. At that time, the limit order is canceled and the stop order status is changed to ‘new’. Any order with a ‘held’ status will not show up in open orders. Could it be that you aren’t seeing some orders because of this.

If there are specific orders in question, let us know the order ID and w can investigate.

3

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the reply. I see that a lot of stop loss limit orders have been cancelled. They all seem to have been cancelled as soon as the buy orders were placed.

I set the limit order to 20% above previous close and stop loss to 30% below previous close. So the bounds are quite wide and have not been crossed for any of my stocks so I don’t see any reason a cancel would be triggered, least of all as soon as the market buy is made.

Happy to send through some trading IDs if you’d like. Should I do that here or is there maybe an email address I can send them to?

4

Actually, scrap that. I’m new to trading and have now noticed that after hours trading has shifted the prices significantly in some cases so that the sell orders were out of bounds when placed relative to the previous closing prices.

Is there a way to set the limit price and stop loss as a percentage relative to the average purchase price? Or do they have to be placed as absolute values?