There are a few reasons why you may be seeing a different price than you expected! We’ve listed some of the more popular ones below.

1) The price fluctuated from the latest quote during the 15-minute delay

Quotes on the Wealthsimple Trade app are delayed by 15 minutes (more here). When you submit a market order, we send this to market right away. This means the price your order is filled at will reflect the real-time price for the asset (which can differ from the price it was trading at 15 minutes prior). We do protect market buy orders against any major price fluctuations with a 5% collar (more information here), but if you wish to have greater control over the price at which your order gets executed at you may want to use limit orders.

To submit a limit order, you would just need to toggle the 'Market Order' option at the top of the order submission flow in the app.

2) You expected the order to be filled at the last traded price, but not based on the live 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.

When you place a market order, you are asking for the market price, which means you must buy at the lowest ask price or sell at the highest bid that is available for the stock.

When you’re submitting an order, you can see the bid/ask prices by tapping the “?” next to the quoted security price on the order submission screen (keep in mind data is delayed by 15 minutes in the app). The “bid” represents what buyers are willing to pay and the “ask” is what sellers are willing to receive.

3) You submitted an ‘odd lot’ order.

The 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.

Ex: 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.

Note: Wealthsimple Trade does not have any control over the price at which orders are executed at.

4) Many finance apps don't show the consolidated market.

If you're comparing prices between your Wealthsimple Trade account and an external market data provider (e.g. Yahoo or Google Finance). It's more likely, that the prices won't exactly match since many providers show prices from the feed of one market player instead of showing a consolidated market price. Market orders are filled by various executing brokers on a handful of different feeds. This means that the price of a stock at a particular point in time will be different depending on the data source.

Note: Wealthsimple Trade does not have any control over the price at which orders are executed at.