Adrian ReidFounder of Enlightened Stock Trading

How to Get the Opening Price With Your Stock Trading System

31 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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0:41

A short YouTube tutorial by Adrian Reid explaining how to obtain the opening price when placing stock trades. Reid advises against using market orders because of spread and slippage; instead he prefers placing a limit order before the market opens at a level likely to be executed in the opening price match. He notes that for very liquid stocks a market order can be acceptable and that Interactive Brokers' market-adaptive algo orders can work well.

Chapters

A market order will just will go into the market as soon as the opening price match is done and and it starts trading freely. The trouble with using a market order is you end up paying the spread and you can also get slippage. So I'm not a huge fan of that. What I rather do is place a limit order before the market opens at a level that I am confident will get executed in the opening price match so that then match happens, you get the opening price, then the market starts trading freely. So that's the way I like to do it. But if it's a very liquid stock, you can also just use a market order. If you're on Interactive Brokers, a market adaptive algo order will do the job pretty well as well.