Trading pending orders vs market orders at the open

[FXS London Scalper]

At the London open, a buy stop above the Asian high and a market order after the break behave differently. Each has its costs.

Pending stop orders:

• Fill automatically, no reaction delay.
• Can fill in a spike that immediately reverses.
• May slip when price jumps through them.

Market orders after confirmation:

• Enter after seeing the break hold, for example an M1 close above the level.
• Enter later, at a worse price.
• Avoid many false breaks.

How to compare: record both possible entries on the same setups for a few weeks, even if only one is traded. Compute results for each.

A worked example: if the pending order is 2 pips better on average but gets caught in a false break 30% more often, the market order may still be better overall.

Limit orders on a retest are a third option, with the risk of missing the move.

Which do you use at the open?

[Amanhasnoname]

For a long time I used buy stops at the open and thought they were free, until I measured them. Over about eighty setups on EURUSD and GBPUSD, the pending orders filled on average 1.4 pips better than my later market entries, but the false breaks cost me enough that the net result was close to a tie. The pairs differed too, and GBPUSD was clearly worse for stop orders because of the slippage on spikes.

What improved things was a hybrid. I place the stop order only when the Asian range is wide, meaning the break is likely to carry, and I use a market entry after an M1 close beyond the level when the range is narrow. A narrow range tends to fake out more often, so I want the confirmation there.

I tried limit entries on the retest as well, but I missed too many clean moves and went back to the hybrid after a month.