Quote from chartman:
Since you are new to equities trading you probably need to be aware of the three P's of equities trading. A majority of traders who have been trading for years, and most of the retail stockbrokers, do not know of this procedural method of order placement in the queue. The P's are: p=price, p=priority, and p= precedence. Of course price equals the best current price on the bid/offer. Priority equals the time of placement of the order and precedence equals the size, number of shares, of the order. You can be the first as far priority and offering the best price but never get an execution due to precedence if orders being placed later are larger than your size. In other words, if your order is for 100 shares and other orders are for 200 or greater shares, they will get executed ahead of you. The market can move away from you while you are waiting even though you were actually first with the best current price. Since this important tid bit of market trading is not on the Series 7, as I have stated, most retail brokers do not know about it. When customers complains about missing the market, the broker will call the order desk and get the canned reply of 'orders being ahead' of yours. They do not know why and the customer never really knows.
I had no idea about that 3rd P!
And it does not work this way in the futures market?