MOO market on open - does one always get the open price?

For a listed stock on the NYSE, if you send your order as 'market on open,' you will get filled on the opening print. Period. No question about it. If you were filled at any other price, then you have a legitimate trade inquiry that you need to file with your broker.

 

I put the order in about 20 minutes before the open. Is there a time limit that you have to put it in earlier?

I will call IB and ask them about it. Since one went in my favor it's a bit odd. They're not executing at the open open.

 

Friend,
some of the other posters have been trying to tell you, the MOO price doesn't have a damn thing to do with where the stock was printing at 9:30:00. There could have been all kinds of prints going on ECNs. If it is an nyse stock you will get some of the opening NYSE print. Not sure how that works with nasdaq, but they might have something similar going on.

 

My fill on the nasdaq stock was 1 penny away. On the NYSE & Amex, it was more than 10 cents away.

 

Just to update the thread, I quit placing MOO for NYSE stocks due to poor fills.

I'm now noticing the same thing with Amex. Today I got a fill almost 4% off the opening price. This is totally unacceptable.

For Nasdaq, I get the exact opening price almost every time.

I think I will drop Amex and just trade Nasdaq. I'm surprised no one else has had similar results.

 

You have not understood yet. You have to make a difference between the first quote of the day and the opening price given by the market maker!!!

 

My point is that if my backtesting depends on getting the open price and I can't get it with NYSE stocks then I have no choice but to not trade them.

If I don't get filled at the opening price with NYSE then I'm wondering who is? and how?

 

You're still not understanding the responses from the previous posters. The fills you see published on sites like Yahoo Finance or from data vendors are probably the first fills from the NMS. These are not the official opening prints from the NYSE, which is the price you're going to get with an OPG order from IB. There is no way to guarantee getting the NMS print.

I posted about this difficulty 6 months ago.

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=109948&highlight=NYSE+fills+worse

 

Sorry, i'm a little slow. It's weird for me because with NASDAQ 99% of the time I get the exact opening price to the penny. So I'd expect the other exchanges to work similarly. 4% difference is huge.

It would seem that the opening price should be set so that all the open queued orders got filled right away. Can anyone explain why they'd open at 10 only to have the price drop to 9.50 to fill all the orders?? Is it cause people add orders at the last minute or at the open?

 

Very interesting thread, I see I'm not the only one. Thanks for the link.

The bottom line is that if one depends on the open price for a strategy (to verify against previous tests or backtesting) then it's best to skip the NYSE. MOO is unpredictable.

I'll experiment with how a limit order will work for me, but it complicates things because I'll have to tag my journal entries NYSE and do the status on them separately.