You can't buy anything for under 2 cents/share here @pubenvelope - it's one of the rules.

Thanks Bear I was unaware of that. I will assume that rule also includes selling. Looks like I'm stuck with the share ha.

Some of the other rules are:

• The 4pm rule: All orders have to be lodged each day BEFORE 4pm Sydney time, so no orders lodged during the pre-CSPA period (4pm to 4:10pm) will go through - those won't be attempted until the end of the following trading day. That applies to ALL orders lodged here after 4pm - they won't be looked at by the system until the following day.
• The 20% rule: You can't place any Buy trade that would take your position in that company beyond 20% of your portfolio value at the time you place the buy trade - however if you are adding to an existing holding here, the value of your existing holding here will be calculated by the system based on the previous day's closing share price because the system has no access to any prices other than end-of-day prices. That's why it has taken me three days so far to try to get my LYL position up to 20% of my portfolio here (the max I can hold of LYL) because the share price on each day has been lower than the previous day.
• The Volume Matching Rule: There is a crude volume matching rule here which I believe works like this: If the shares did not trade on the market today, you won't be able to buy OR sell that company's shares today (so if they are in a trading halt, trading suspension, or if nobody bothered to buy or sell any shares on the real market) AND when they do trade on the real market, you can only buy or sell the VOLUME of shares that actually traded. For instance, if you are trying to buy 20,000 shares in XYZ @ $1.20 here, and XYZ traded 5,000 shares across the whole day (total volume traded) and closed at $1.18, PART of your trade will go through, i.e. 5,000 @ $1.18, and the other 15,000 will stay in place (as a buy @ $1.20) for up to 2 weeks (unless that's been changed to a longer period) unless it is executed, modified or cancelled earlier.
• The order of execution: The system will attempt to execute all of your pending sell orders BEFORE it attempts ANY of your buy orders. If any of your sell orders fail, it will move on to the next sell order until it has tried to execute all of them. It then does the same thing with all of your buy orders, one at a time. If any of your orders do go through, they always go through at the closing price (on the actual real market), not at your limit price (unless the two are the same price).
• Why orders fail: Orders will not go through here if they are a buy order for under 2 cents/share, or if they are lodged after 4pm on that day, or if they break the 20% rule, or if that company didn't trade today on the real market, or if there is insufficient available virtual cash in your Strawman account AFTER your sell orders have all been processed (see last rule), or if the price limit conditions are not met, so if it's a buy, your nominated limit price has to be equal to or above the closing price for the company (only closing prices are looked at by the system - intraday prices are irrelevant), and if it's a sell order, your nominated limit price must be equal to or below the closing price for the company. And that's all subject to the volume matching rule. And with all buy orders, there has to be sufficient available cash in your Strawman account at the point in time that the system attempts to process the buy order. If there is not sufficient cash to process the whole order, the order will fail, so no shares will be bought. The only time that PART of a buy order will go through is due to the volume matching rule, explained above.

Something to be aware of is that every time you lodge a sell order, the system will make that cash available to you to lodge buy orders with - as though the sell order had already gone through, however it's an illusion, because if those sell orders do NOT go through, neither will the buy orders, because the cash won't be there to allow them to go through. The idea was to be able to sell and then buy on the same day without having to wait until the next trading day to put the cash to work with another company. The drawback is that it can make you think you have more cash than you actually have. For instance if you held 100,000 XYZ and you wanted to sell them at 10 cents ($10 K total) because that's where they are trading today and you bought them for 5 cents each (i.e. $5 K) and want to take profits, but you instead lodge the sell order for 100,000 XYZ at $10 (so $10 instead of 10c, i.e. forgetting the "." [point/full-stop] before the "10") the system will increase your available cash (to use for buy trades) by $1,000,000 (i.e. $1 million). Obviously you can't spend that $1m on any other buys because those XYZ shares are not going to sell for $10 each, so there's an illusion that you've got an extra $1mil to spend here, but you haven't.

If I think of anything else, I'll add it later.

No, you can sell for under 2 cents @pubenvelope , you just can't buy for under 2 cents here. That rule was introduced a few years ago because there was a competition being held (called "The Strawman Classic" I think it was) as part of an early promotion where the person who could make the most amount of paper money here within a set timeframe won a cash prize, and as with all competitions some people will do whatever they can within the rules to win, and one of those things was to place buy trades in stocks that were trading at $0.001 and then place sell trades in the same company at $0.002. Because one tenth of a cent is the smallest increment a stock can move by when it's that low (under 10 cents/share we get one tenths of a cent increments), the smallest gain a stock trading at $0.001 can have is to move to $0.002, which is actually +100%, so when that happens they doubled their money (their virtual money). It's not the sort of trade most people would likely do with real money but because it wasn't real money, people did it, and some people made quite a lot of (virtual) profit from that strategy.

After a number of complaints, to try to make the playing field more level for people that were trying to win by investing rather than very short term trading using that loophole, Andrew (Strawman) introduced the 2 cent minimum buy rule. He explained why he chose 2 cents at the time, and I remember it did make sense, but I can't remember it word for word so I won't try.

The competition has long since ended however the rule remains, and it doesn't bother the vast majority of members because they're not looking to own companies trading below 2 cents/share for the most part.

The argument is that the share price movements become much more extreme down below 2c, so it encourages trading rather than investing, and/or skews performance numbers, or has the potential to, so that's probably why the rule is still in place.

One more thing, any orders that fail will stay in the system for a set period of time and then they will be automatically purged (deleted), unless you modify or delete them in the meantime. If you modify the order, the time starts again, which is either 2 or 4 weeks I think from when the trade was lodged or modified, whichever came last. @Strawman can clarify.

Every trading day (i.e. day when the ASX trades) the system will re-attempt to process the orders after the market closes subject to all of those rules, as long as the order remains in the system, so no orders are just "good for the day" - if your order didn't go through and you no longer want it to be attempted on a subsequent day, you need to cancel the order.

That's totally fair, thanks for the detailed explanation! Hopefully this helps out someone else in future.

Yep, and the other thing is that the system is reliant on the data provider, currently still S&P I think, which means that the system can't attempt to process any trades here until after S&P make the end-of-day prices and trading volume numbers available, which is after the 4:12pm (Sydney time) end-of-day CSPA (closing single price auction) that runs from 4:10 to 4:12pm (right after the pre-CSPA that runs from 4pm to 4:10pm during which time on the real market you can lodge and modify and delete orders but no trades take place, then at 4:10pm no new trades or changes are accepted in the real market and the CSPA then takes place). That's all in the real market though, not here. Here, the cut-off is 4pm and anything lodged after 4pm is queued up for the next available trading day.

The data providers aren't always reliable, so occasionally there are delays, and then sometimes some of the data is missing and not all prices here may always update at the same time. The system here never tries to process trades until it has confirmed that all the day's pricing and volume data has been succesfully uploaded/updated from the data provider. This is usually some time between 4:30pm and 5:30pm, or up until 6pm, but occasionally it can take longer, and when it does take longer it's almost always because of datafeed issues from the data provider.

No worries @pubenvelope - it's not the first time I've explained all that to newbies but I can't find where that info is now - it would be good to have it all very easily accessable from a button on the home page - or perhaps a "Help/Trading Rules" button could be there whenever anybody goes to place a trade that would cause a pop-up window to appear (like a drop-down menu) when that button was clicked - with all of the trading rules on it.

Andrew has also explained most if not all of it somewhere here: https://strawman.com/blog ...but, again, I struggle to easily locate what I'm looking for there also. We don't have a really good search function here yet. We can search for company names, but when it comes to blogs it ain't easy, and with forums you can only search for 4 letter minimum words in the TITLES of the forums, not within the forums themselves. The other day I was trying to put together a list of all of the forums on LICs and LITs - Listed Investment Companies/Trusts, but I could only search for "LICs" and "LITs" in forum titles, so it missed any that didn't have that "s", such as "LIC & LIT Forum" didn't get found because there's no "s" after LIC or LIT and you can't search for "LIC" because there's a 4 letter minimum. A little frustrating, but the site is getting better every year, and despite a few small annoying missing functions, it's PDG.

[pretty damn good].

Thanks @Bear77, you've nailed it.

When you open a trade order pad, there is a help button at the top right which will explain some of the rules, but we do really need to make this better.

And I agree we need to add a better forum search and an ability for users to pin/bookmark posts. We will get onto that when we can.

Thanks @Strawman - I just fixed one mistake I made - I said "decimal place" when I meant dot/full-stop, so I changed that. By the way, I do appreciate the way I can make small gramatical changes and fix small errors like spelling mistakes/missing letters (or the wrong word used) in forum posts without affecting the "like" count. I've often made small changes to Straws and "Vals" and then looked later and thought - well, nobody likes that one - forgetting that the counter always resets to zero whenever you change a straw or valuation. I can understand it with a valuation, particularly when you're changing the number at the top (the $ valuation number), but probably not necessary with straws, but I know the reason behind it, so lets not get into that again - just saying - it's good to be able to go in a fix up my forum posts whenever I spot a typo, which is probably why I MOSTLY do forum posts, and rarely do straws or valuations (by comparison).

In terms of the "like" count, it helps me in that it tells me if people are interested or not in what I am writing. Very low like count probably means I could probably spend my time elsewhere because nobody is interested in that topic or that company. No good creating content that nobody wants to read or very few people enjoy reading or get any value from.

By the way @Strawman - how long DO unexecuted trades stay in the system (as I have described above) - is it 2 weeks, 4 weeks, or something entirely different?

Yeah I think we've got the balance mostly right@Bear77, but there's always more fine tuning possible.

Feedback is always helpful though.

In terms of pending trades, I believe it's 4 weeks, but it's been so long I forget! and will need someone to check the code.

OK, just heading off for a two day road trip. Be back Monday. Have a good weekend y'all.

I have similar issue for CRYP up to $10.55 yesterday, didn't seem to go through overnight.

Hi @Rick, looks like your buy order is reliant on your MLD sell order being filled before you have funds available for the PNV trade.

We treat pending sell orders as available cash so you can sell and buy on the same day, but if the sell doesn't go through your buy order will remain in pending.

Hi @Hands, your order is actually for the ASX:HACK ETF, not ASX:CRYP

:)

OMG! Extremely careless trader. Or extremely careless reader!

Sorry for taking up your time @Strawman

Got it! Thanks Andrew :)