Jonathan Hewitt
Active Member
One would think they would be perfectly fine. But when I had a 10%+ stop loss on AAPL at ~260, and it decided to drop to ~230 over the course of 5 minutes back in the flash crash, my AAPL shares got sold at 203 and it recovered to 260 in a matter of minutes. And of course, since AAPL wasn't an "affected stock" (that only applied to stocks which lost 40% of their value, or some nonsense like that), the trades didn't get cancelled, as they did for many other stocks.
Still pretty pissed about that.
As for short-term movements: Frankfurt opened and we're up to $257. Only 3k shares traded of course, but this is making the 260 calls I wrote yesterday look pretty bad. Pennies in front of a steamroller indeed. Does anyone know if most brokerages provide a way to designate which shares to get called away, if it comes down to that?
Yes, you can easily set last in first out or first in first out. You should also be able to designate certain shares during the settling period after the sale, or worst case call your broker and tell him which shares you want to have called away. My brokerage stinks in most ways and I can even do these things.