How to make a market order (on Poloniex)

What is a market order?

A market order lets a trader buy or sell an asset at the best price currently available. It is an indispensable tool in every trader’s toolbelt, and is designed to be executed immediately.

The way a market order is filled is that Poloniex’s system will find the best available price in the chosen trading pair’s order book, which is composed of other traders’ limit orders.

Market order vs. limit order

Whereas market orders trigger at the best available price, limit orders tell the system to buy or sell at a fixed price. While this does give more control, there is a distinct possibility that you will have to wait a while to have your order filled, especially with less popular trading pairs. Some limit orders may not fill at all if your price conditions aren’t met.

Pros and cons

While a market order is powerful in that it lets traders respond quickly to market trends and make more immediate trading decisions, it does suffer from lack of control in the price traders pay/ the amount of crypto they get from their order.

Because it depends on what is available in a trading pair’s order book, a market order may suffer from slippage as the system tries to match it with what’s available.

For instance, if your market order is for 200 USDT of BTC, but the best available price is for a limit order with 100 USDT of BTC, your order will move up the order book until filling your order, and you may end up getting less USDT than you expected.

Secondly, a market order doesn’t allow you to plan out your trades. For setting out more complex trading strategies, or to execute a trade when you can’t be at your computer/phone, a limit stop-limit, or stop-market order should be your trade tool of choice.

How to make a market order on Poloniex

Making a market order is not only fast, it’s also quite easy to conduct.

First things first, before trading on Poloniex, make sure your account has enough funds to complete the trade that you want. Poloniex offers a large number of coin wallets into which you can make a deposit. Please remember that only crypto-to-crypto coin trades are supported and some of these coins have a minimum deposit amount. Furthermore, trades must satisfy a minimum amount depending on the trading pair.

1. From the Poloniex homepage, click on “Trade” on the menu bar.

2. From there, you will be taken to the spot market page, where you will be able to select “Market” from the order options on the left side of the page.

3. The first thing you might notice is that in the price field it says “Most optimal price”, so don’t worry about that. Just enter the amount you want to buy, or select from the percentages below to spend a percentage of the token you’re buying with that exists in your wallet.

4. Then confirm your order by pressing buy (or sell if selling).

And that’s it! The system will match you with a limit order from the order book. Market orders are one of the new features that launched with our New Trading System upgrade, and let you respond quickly to changes in the market.

Feeling ready to sign up and get going? Signing up and trading is easy with Poloniex! Get started here: https://poloniex.com/signup/

How to make a market order (on Poloniex) was originally published in The Poloniex blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.