When you want to open a trade in Metatrader, you have 2 options.

You can enter the market – buy or sell – at the current price.

In this case, you need to click “New Order” and then choose “Market Execution”.

Then you either “Sell by Market” or “Buy by Market” and your trade is immediately filled.

However, it may happen that you don’t want to buy/sell at the current price because you have a different entry level in mind.

Using a pending order, it’s possible to choose the entry level in advance, and your trade will be filled only if the price reaches that level – it will happen automatically and you won’t need to be in front of the monitor at that moment.

Imagine that you expect the price of a currency pair to go up in future and want to buy.

There are 2 possibilities.

You can set a buy order at a lower price than it’s now if you think that the price will firstly decline and then turn up.

To buy at a lower level, choose a Buy Limit order.

You can also set a buy order above the current price if you expect that growth will intensify once the price breaks above a certain level.

To buy at a higher level, choose Buy Stop order.

There are similar options for selling: you can put your sell order above the current price – for that you will need a Sell Limit order – or below the current price, in which case you will require a Sell Stop order.

Let’s see how it’s done in MT4.

Click “New Order”. In the box called “Type” choose “Pending order”.

Additional parameters will appear in the window.

For example, we want to buy EUR/USD 30 pips below the current price.

The order type should be “Buy Limit”.

We type the level in the “at price” box.

You can also set the expiry time of the order.

If the order was not triggered by this time, it will be deleted automatically.

Notice that order may not expire earlier than in 10 minutes.

If we wanted to buy 30 pips above the current price, we would need to choose “Buy Stop” order type.

Click “Place”.

The number and status of the pending order will appear in the “Terminal – Trade” tab and the level of the order will be shown on the chart.

To edit or delete a pending order, right-click on this order in the chart window.

Once the price reaches the level of a pending order, a trade position will be opened.

These changes will be shown in the “Terminal – Trade” window.

Congratulations! Now you know how to use pending orders. Find out Traders’ secret weapon: pending orders

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