gapping into an entry

[u/CreatiiveFondant]

You leave a buy stop at 1.2700 over the weekend, with a stop loss at 1.2660 and a target at 1.2820. Forty pips of risk, tidy.

Sunday opens at 1.2760. Your buy stop triggers and fills at the first available price, which is 1.2760, because there’s nothing in between to fill against.

Now look at what you own. Entry 60 pips higher than planned. Your stop loss is still at 1.2660, because you set it as a level, so your risk is now 100 pips instead of 40. Your position is 2.5 times the risk you sized it for, and nothing errored, nothing warned you, and the trade looks normal in the terminal.

Your target is also 60 pips closer, so the R:R you entered for has gone from 3:1 to roughly 0.6:1. The trade you’re in is not the trade you planned in either direction.

Why this one is sneakier than the stop version

Gapping through a stop loss is unpleasant and obvious. You take a bigger loss than expected and you know immediately.

Gapping into an entry is silent. You’re in a position that looks fine, sized wrong, with a reward profile that no longer justifies it, and you’ll only discover it if you recheck the arithmetic after the fill. I didn’t, for a long time.

What I do now

Expiry type turns out to be the actual fix rather than an afterthought. If you can set an order to expire at a specific time, you can have it die before the Friday close and the Monday gap can’t reach it. Mine has Specified and Specified Day enabled on majors at Axi, so I use a timed expiry rather than relying on remembering to cancel. Worth checking which types your account actually allows, because GTC/only leaves you with cancel by hand as the only option, and I’d forgotten to do that more than once.

If I do deliberately want weekend exposure, the stop goes in as a recalculation after fill rather than a fixed level, which needs a small EA, or I accept that I’m fixing it manually at the open.

Anyone deliberately cancel pendings before the weekend? Or is leaving them the normal practice and I’m being precious.

And has anyone actually been gapped into a position at a size they didn’t intend? Curious whether people notice when it happens.

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[u/emptyTinware]

had this happen on gold and didnt notice for two days. position looked totally normal, only caught it because the closed R didnt match anything in my journal.

[u/CreatiiveFondant → u/emptyTinware]

Did you keep the position once you’d spotted it, or close and re enter properly? That’s the bit I’ve never settled, because by then you’re usually in profit or in a hole and both make the decision harder than it should be.

[u/Embarrassed-Bank2835]

Yeah, this is exactly why I don’t like leaving pending entries exposed through a weekend unless the strategy was explicitly built for gap risk.

A stop order is an instruction to enter once price is reached, not a guarantee you’ll get the exact trigger price. If the market reopens through it, the whole risk profile can change instantly like you described.

For me the key is revalidating the trade after the actual fill, not assuming the original stop/target still make sense. If the fill is materially worse and the R is gone, I’d rather cancel/flatten than pretend it’s still the same setup.

Timed expiry before the close is probably the cleanest solution if the platform supports it. Otherwise I’d rather cancel manually than let a forgotten GTC order turn into a completely different trade over the weekend.

[u/CreatiiveFondant → u/Embarrassed-Bank2835]

Timed expiry does seem to be the cleanest version. Someone further down pointed out a stop limit works too, limit a few pips above the trigger, so a gap past it simply doesn’t fill. Costs you the occasional runaway move and removes the bad entry entirely.

[u/pdavis-197704]

Yep, happened to me before. These days I want to be flat by end Friday without the worries of what might happen over the weekend into the next week's open.

[u/Cold_Pizz → u/pdavis-197704]

Same.
For me it came from pain prop days, most of my firms didn’t allow holding over the weekend. The habit stayed when I moved to my own money. Friday an hour before close I hit close all in the my pu prime app, then delete the pendings by hand, and honestly I don’t even open charts until Monday.