Market Basics · beginner · 6 min
Market vs Limit Orders
When you decide to trade, you still have to say how. The two most basic instructions you can give are a market order and a limit order. They sit at opposite ends of one trade-off — speed versus price — and knowing which is which explains a lot about why fills come out the way they do.
The market order: trade now
A market order says: fill me immediately, at whatever the best available price is. It prioritises certainty of execution over price. You will (barring an outright halt) get filled, and fast — but you accept the price the market is offering at that instant.
That price is the other side of the spread. A market order to buy takes the current ask; a market order to sell hits the current bid. In a liquid market that's a tiny cost. In a thin one, a large market order can walk through several price levels — filling a bit here, a bit higher there — and the average price you end up with is worse than the top of the book. That gap is slippage, and it's the price of demanding immediacy (see Volume and Liquidity).
The limit order: name your price
A limit order says: fill me only at this price or better — otherwise wait. A buy limit at 100.00 will fill at 100.00 or lower, never higher. It prioritises price over certainty.
The catch is symmetric to the market order's: you control the price but not whether you get filled at all. If the market never trades down to your limit, your order simply sits there, unfilled. And even if price touches your level, there may not be enough on the other side to fill your whole order. A limit order is a resting instruction in the queue — one of those resting orders you can see stacked on the depth-of-market ladder.
The trade-off, plainly
| Market order | Limit order | |
|---|---|---|
| You control | Execution (you get filled) | Price (you set the level) |
| You give up | Price (you take what's offered) | Certainty (may never fill) |
| Typical use | "Get me in/out now" | "Only at my price" |
Neither is better; they answer different needs. Wanting out of a position quickly and wanting a specific entry price are genuinely different goals, and the two order types exist because both goals are legitimate. This lesson describes the mechanics — it is not telling you which to use or when to trade.
Beyond the basics
Most platforms layer more order types on top — stop orders (which turn into a market or limit order once price reaches a trigger, often used to cap a loss), stop-limit, and time-in-force settings like "good-for-day" or "fill-or-kill". They are all combinations of the same two ideas: a price condition and an execution instruction. Get market-versus-limit straight and the rest are variations on it.
A note on where Visor fits: Visor is a charting, research and intelligence workspace, not a broker — you don't place live orders through it. Understanding order types still matters here, because they shape how the ladder and the tape you read in Visor behave, and because they connect directly to risk topics like where a protective stop sits and how position size interacts with fills.
What to read next
- The Bid, the Ask, and the Spread — the price a market order crosses.
- Long and Short — the direction an order takes you in.
- The DOM Ladder — where resting limit orders live.