Strange order fill with HL

bd10

Hi all,
has anyone experienced the following: with my little ISA with HL I wanted to buy some shares today. Placing the order online was problematic. I could not get a market order executed in full. Wanted to buy 700 shares, they did not price it. So I reduced it to half of that, then I got a price, which I hit. Wanted to repeat it to get a fill for the other half. No quote. Then I placed a limit order at the offer and there were more than 350 on the offer, so should have been filled. Again, nothing. Only when I reduced to 100 lots at a time I got a price. So I had get the rest filled in clips of 100, running up unnecessary commission in the process. Trading of the stock in question was not suspended at the LSE, so how can one not get possibly filled using a market order? I don't get that. When I spoke with the help desk what was going on they were going on about using fill-or-kill orders. I should have used those instead of market orders. But why should I use a FOK if market orders always have top priority? Anyone ever experienced anything like that?
Thanks

george4064

Which share was this? And when did this happen?

Every share have what's called an 'EMS' which stands for electronic market size, 99% of the time if you try to get a quote for more shares than the EMS you won't get one. 

Also, when markets are moving a lot it can be hard to get an electronic quote (even if within the typical EMS), so this could be another reason why you had issues. 

MarkCarnage

Yes, difficult to comment without knowing the share. If it's was PAT, I can understand why a 500 share order might be an issue ! 

Also, did you place it out of hours?

bd10

It was MNKS.L this morning. I went through times & sales and 35k+ shares traded during that 30 min interval, so that's sufficient liquidity and trading was not suspended. Last week when I bought another LSE listed paper no issued at all, 4k lots without an issue in one clip. Have asked HL for an explanation. Thanks for the hint re EMS, will read up on that. 

Sorcerer2018

Monks is currently sitting at 2000 EMS so you shouldn't have an issues buying/selling them. But I noticed today HL are no longer showing Recent Trades. I am wondering if they are having an issue themselves?

george4064

Sorcerer2018 said:

Monks is currently sitting at 2000 EMS so you shouldn't have an issues buying/selling them. But I noticed today HL are no longer showing Recent Trades. I am wondering if they are having an issue themselves?

Their 'recent trades' feed often doesn't show, I think this comes from issues which arise when market activity has picked up (which it has recently due to recent volatility) and there are simply too many trades to list. So looks like they just switch it off or it happens automatically that the feed stops displaying when there is simply too much data come from the stock exchange feed which reports every trade, namely quantity and price.

I have read a few articles saying that recent trading activity amongst the investment platforms (HL, AJ Bell, II etc) have seen record activity as clients are shuffling their portfolios around or 'buying the dip', so not surprised to see the 'Recent Trades' feed struggling.

Thrugelmir

There's been an extremely high trading volume in the share in late February and yesterday (897 trades). Market maker might be temporarily suspending pricing. Depending upon on volumes of purchases and sales being enacted. 

bd10

In cases the market goes crazy, they widen their spreads, but it's all automatic, all machines doing the market making in milliseconds, so I can't quite follow HL's logic when they answered me earlier today that they forwarded the request for quote to their market maker for manual pricing. In fact I was waiting for 2 minutes for a price and they passed the buck back to me that I pulled the order, well. ... This is not the 80s... . Anyways, I was not aware how remote a humble retail fellow like me is from the actual market place. I cannot help but contrast this to the CME, there you can be the bid and ask and get filled according to exchange rules. No middle man making you a market on top of the market place. That's true transparency at a fraction of the costs: <$2/side with exchange fees included not like here with HL charging a tenner and then no clear cut answer how one's orders gets passed on and who gets first dips. (I know, can't really compare both venues but the contrast is nevertheless a stark one). Apologies for this last part, just rant, just irritated by it all.

Sorcerer2018

I guess getting access to the Level 2 Order Book might help understand what is going on, I just didn't fancy paying £50 a month for the privilege.