Automatic Order Spread

To have the ability, when placing an advanced order, to specify the number of shares you wish to sell and to specify a min/max price range. Thus having a spread of orders automatically placed for you without the laborious work.

eg

SELL
Quantity: 100
Increment: 4
Min Price: 0.50
Max Price: 0.60

Preview:
25 0.525
25 0.550
25 0.575
25 0.600

I think that if spread trading like this was to become common place (outside of the market maker of course), a new interface for managing these orders would be required.

I don't think I'd want to have a few hundred active orders to trade on spreads, probably it wouldn't do much for ipredict's server performance either.

So these "spread orders" would have to be a permanently combined entity, not just an easy way to create a bunch of orders. You'd need to be able to edit a "spread order" as one. And likewise, cancel a spread order as one.

This also brings in the conditional orders idea I mentioned in another thread.

It would seem reasonable that you would also want your sell points to go down in a falling market, and your buy points to go up in a rising one, in concert with the market, as does the market maker.

Without conditional (or dynamic) orders, this wouldn't be possible I think, because you'd always sell at the lowest sell order you place. So a condition would be necessary to say "this sell order is only active if the last sale price is under $0.xx".

Then again, I question if this is really what iPredict wants to (or should) be about, is placing such orders really a prediction or is it just a bet on the market, not taking into account the stock definition at all.

You could have orders nested under an expandable stock title. That way if you cancel the parent order all the children get nuked along with it. To be honest, thats probably a good feature to have regardless of the above.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2010 12:55PM by Artist.