The site's referral record is not registered; the code, benefits and commercial arrangement in the account-opening guide remain unverified. Nothing here is platform-specific, because the point of the page is the part that is not platform-specific. Full disclosure.
Order types, and why the name on the button is unreliable
Learn to read the parameter fields and you can identify any order type on any platform in about ten seconds, including ones you have never seen before.
Two platforms offer an order called "stop-limit" and it behaves differently on each. A third offers the same behaviour under a different name entirely. The names are marketing; the fields are the specification.
Two orders that everything else is built from
Every order type on any platform is a combination of two primitives and some conditions about when to submit them.
A limit order specifies a price and waits. It executes at your price or better, or it does not execute. What you give up is certainty of execution.
A market order specifies a quantity and executes now against whatever is available. What you give up is certainty of price.
That is the whole vocabulary. Everything with a longer name is one of these two, submitted automatically when a condition is met, or with a rule attached about what happens to the unfilled part.
Which of the two you use has a fee consequence that is usually larger than the difference between platforms. A limit order that rests in the book adds liquidity and pays the maker rate; a market order takes it and pays the taker rate. On a typical entry tier that gap is the same order of magnitude as the gap between an entry tier and a mid tier — which means how you place orders can matter more than which tier you have climbed to. The fee structures page works that arithmetic through.
The fields that identify any order
Ignore the name on the tab. Look at which of these the form asks you for.
| Field | What its presence means |
|---|---|
| Price | There is a limit component. Without it, execution is at market and the price is whatever the book gives you. |
| Trigger price (or stop price) | Nothing is submitted until the market reaches this level. Until then the order does not exist in the book. |
| Time in force | What happens to any unfilled remainder: rest in the book, cancel immediately, or all-or-nothing. |
| Post-only / reduce-only flag | A constraint on how the order may interact: post-only refuses to execute immediately, reduce-only refuses to increase a position. |
An order form asking for a trigger price and a price is a stop-limit, whatever it is called. One asking for a trigger price and no price is a stop-market, whatever it is called. One asking for a price with a post-only flag is a maker-guaranteed limit order. The vocabulary varies; the fields do not.
The name that causes the most trouble
"Stop-loss" is the term with the widest gap between what people believe it does and what it does.
A stop order is an instruction to submit an order when a trigger price is reached. It is not a guarantee of exiting at that price, and the distinction becomes expensive in exactly the conditions that cause people to set one.
Stop-market: when triggered, submits a market order. You will exit. The price is whatever the book offers at that moment, which in a fast move can be considerably worse than your trigger. You are guaranteed execution and nothing about price.
Stop-limit: when triggered, submits a limit order at your specified price. You control the price and may not exit at all — if the market moves through your limit without filling, the order rests unfilled while the position continues to move against you. This is the failure mode that surprises people, because the protective order they set was working exactly as specified.
Neither is the safe choice. They fail differently, and the choice is which failure you would rather have during a sharp move. What is not defensible is setting one without knowing which of the two you set, and the interface will not always make it obvious.
Some platforms use "stop-loss" to mean the market variant and some the limit variant. Some offer both under one tab distinguished only by whether you fill in the price field. Read the fields.
Time in force, which is quietly a fee setting
The dropdown most people never touch decides what happens to the part of your order that does not fill immediately, and it interacts directly with what you are charged.
- Good till cancelled rests in the book until filled or cancelled. Anything that fills from the book pays the maker rate.
- Immediate or cancel fills what it can right now and cancels the remainder. It takes liquidity, so it pays the taker rate.
- Fill or kill executes entirely at once or not at all. Also taker.
- Post-only is the one worth knowing. It refuses to execute immediately: if the order would take liquidity, it is cancelled rather than filled. This is the only way to guarantee the maker rate, and it is available on most platforms in a menu people never open.
A limit order priced aggressively enough to cross the spread executes immediately and is charged as a taker, despite being a limit order. People who believe they are always paying maker rates because they always use limit orders are frequently wrong about this, and post-only is how you find out.
The cost that no order type avoids
There is a cost on every trade that appears on no fee schedule and in no order confirmation, and on small trades in thin markets it exceeds everything discussed above.
The book has a best bid and a best ask, and the gap between them is the spread. Buy at market and you pay the ask; sell at market and you receive the bid. The round trip costs you the spread before any fee is charged.
In a deep market on a major pair this is negligible. In a thin one it is not, and it scales badly: an order large relative to what is resting nearby walks up through several price levels, and the average price you get is worse than the top of the book you were looking at. This is slippage, and no fee tier reduces it.
Which produces the practical hierarchy, roughly in order of size for an ordinary account:
- Spread and slippage — reduced by using limit orders and by trading liquid pairs.
- Maker versus taker — controlled by post-only and by patience.
- Your fee tier — largely outside your control at ordinary volumes.
Most attention goes to the third. The first two are where the money is.
Checking a platform's actual behaviour
Names are unreliable, so verify behaviour rather than reading marketing copy.
- Open the order form and enumerate the fields. Which are required, which are optional, what happens when you leave the price blank.
- Find the time-in-force menu. Some platforms hide it behind an "advanced" toggle. Confirm post-only exists.
- Read the help page for the stop variants specifically. Establish whether the default triggers a market or a limit order, in writing, before you rely on one.
- Place one small order of each kind and read the fill record. The trade history shows the actual fee charged and whether it was maker or taker. This settles every question above definitively, and it costs one small round trip.
That last step is the same principle that runs through everything on this site: what a platform does is checkable, what it says about itself is not. The fill record does not have a marketing department.