Wealthsimple does not have any power over what price your order is ultimately executed at. That being said, our executing brokers are legally obligated to fill your order at the best price available in the market.

If your order filled at a different price than expected, there are a few reasons why this may be the case.

You expected the order to be filled at the last traded price instead of on the bid and ask prices

The last traded price represents the last transaction a willing buyer and seller entered into for that security. While the last traded price may be helpful to gauge where the market is at generally, it is not necessarily still available as a live bid or offer anymore, and therefore may not be the actual price you will have your order filled at.

The bid and ask price refers to the highest price that a buyer is willing to pay for the asset (the bid), and the lowest price that a seller is willing to part with their shares (the ask) at that particular moment in time.

How the bid/ask spread works —

• When you submit a market buy or market sell, your order looks to pair with a buyer at the quoted price. If it's not able to do so, it will execute at the next best available price.
• As a result, the quote is an indicator but does not guarantee the price at which your order will fill. It provides an approximation based on the last known trade for a board lot.

Note: When you’re submitting an order, you can see the bid/ask prices and the last sale price by tapping the “?” next to the quoted security price on the order submission screen. The “bid” represents what buyers are willing to pay and the “ask” is what sellers are willing to receive.

You are comparing with non-consolidated market price data

If you're comparing prices between your Wealthsimple self-directed investing account and an external market data provider (e.g. Yahoo or Google Finance), it's likely that the prices won't match.

Wealthsimple shows prices from the feed of one market data provider instead of showing a consolidated market price. Market orders are filled by various executing brokers on a handful of different feeds, which means that the price of a stock at a particular point in time will be different depending on the data source.

You submitted an ‘odd lot’ order

Quotes for most securities are made based on a standardized number of units (usually 100, referred to as board lots). If you submit an order for an odd lot of shares, your order will only be filled based on the National Best Bid or Offer (NBBO). The NBBO may not match a specific quote provider’s data, as the NBBO takes into account all protected markets the symbol trades on, whereas a quote provider may only consider the data on one exchange.

The TSX and TSX-V consider the below order sizes to be board lots, anything that is outside of this would be considered an odd-lot.

US markets (NASDAQ, NYSE etc.) consider 100 shares to be a board lot regardless of the price.

For example, if an order is submitted for 150 shares of stock XYZ that closed yesterday at a price of $5.00 per share. 100 shares would be considered a board lot and the remaining 50 would be considered an odd-lot.