Hindsight Markets / Glossary

Why didn't my limit order fill?

Updated 23 October 2026 · By Hindsight Markets

A limit order fills only when someone trades with it at your price or better, and only after the orders that were at that price before yours have filled. So the price can touch your limit, and even trade there, without filling you: you were behind in the queue, or the price left before the queue reached you. A halt, the session or the order's own settings can also keep it from filling.

A touch is not a fill: the queue

Each exchange keeps its own queue at each price. Orders there fill in the order they arrived, so a new limit order joins the back. For your order to fill, buyers or sellers have to trade through everything ahead of you first, on the exchange where your order sits. A print at your price on the tape tells you someone traded there. It does not tell you the trade reached you.

A real example: POM at 1.60, 21 October 2026

At 2:22 p.m. a large offer appeared at 1.60 on POM. Here is what the order book and the tape show over the next few minutes, read from that day's data:

Say you had a limit order to sell at 1.60 on Nasdaq, placed at 2:24:26. The price touched your limit a second later, and the tape printed 1.60. But 49,695 shares on Nasdaq were ahead of you, and only 10,123 of them traded before the price fell back. Your order would not have filled until buyers came back at 2:25:57, a minute and a half later. If you had given up and cancelled at 1.58, you would have missed it.

The 1.60 prints on other exchanges at 2:24:27 did not help either: a trade on one exchange works through that exchange's own queue. The rest of POM's day, with ten halts and an after-hours run, is on the POM runner page.

Other reasons a limit order does not fill

The price never reached it

A buy limit below the best offer, or a sell limit above the best bid, waits until someone trades there. On a fast stock the price can move away and never come back.

The stock is halted

During a LULD pause or a news halt nothing trades, at any price. Your order waits for the reopening auction, and the stock can reopen well away from your limit. More on how to trade halts and resumptions.

The session

An order that is only good for the regular session does not work in the pre-market or after hours. Check how your platform marks an order for those sessions, and see practice the pre-market and the open.

Only part of it filled

A limit order can fill in pieces. If fewer shares traded at your price than you asked for, the rest stays open, a partial fill. See order types.

How limit orders fill in Hindsight Markets

A resting limit order waits in the real queue of the exchange it is routed to, Nasdaq by default, behind the size that was already there that day. During regular hours an off-exchange trade priced through your limit fills it at your limit price; one at your price does not. Hidden size is not modeled. The full list is on the disclaimer page. Your own order is marked at its price in Level 2, so you can watch the size ahead of it shrink.