Why am I being told I don’t have enough stock to sell? When I do??

[Micky88]

Hi anyone know why I’m being told ‘I don’t have enough of a stock to sell when I clearly do’? Trying to short 10 shares using a limit order and its saying that it don’t have enough to do that’ I bought the shares earlier today, is there a settling period or am I missing soemthing? 

[SimonSplat]

Hey Micky - I am finding the same issue. However I think in my case at least that if I have 50 shares in Expedia and I have a limit order to sell all 50 at $80 then it kind of "reserves" the stocks. If I try and set a stop loss at $75 for those 50 shares then it comes up with the error  "you dont have enough stock".

I suppose it's trying to protect the scenario where you can set up 2 sell orders that may fire at the same time. It should be a bit more intelligent than that though and look at when the sell orders would fire and if they would never fire at the same time then it allows them to be set and it executes whichever condition is met first.

I'm not liking this with IG as it leaves you open to either losing more than you planned or having to keep a hawk-eye and hover over the sell button to meet your margin for selling on the upper limit.

IG - any plans for this to be looked at??!?

Simon

[SimonSplat]

Mickey - for now I am preferring to set Stop losses (just in case) and then set alerts on the stock for my Sell price (which would be the limit order I would have set up....) when I get the alert I log in and do that bit manually at the risk of missing my target price! Eek..

Good luck,

Simon