New Feature - Opening Trades Submitted AFTER Closing Trades Executed

I had previously blogged about how my Opening Orders were rejected for insufficient funds because my Closing Orders weren't executed yet and how to work around that scenario.

Now, I would like to report on a new feature built by the Nirvana team to essentially eliminates the issue I had encountered. The Nirvana team changed the way the system works how Opening and Closing Orders are submitted. If the system sees that you have both Opening and Closing Orders queued up for the market open, it will hold the Opening Orders until AFTER the Closing Orders are executed!

From their announcement:

We have released an enhancement to the Trade Ideas Platform. This change applies to the “Delay Opening Orders" setting under the Trade tab.

The prior behavior of this setting would delay all opening orders and submit them simultaneously at the specified time. The feature was designed to wait for equity from closing orders to become available. The problem with this was that you didn't know when equity became available, and you might be submitting your open orders several minutes later than when funds were available. The new behavior allows the opening orders to be submitted as soon as equity is freed from the execution of closing orders. It will do so up to the specified time. Ultimately you will see the same executed orders (closing and opening), but with an improved execution time on opening orders when using the Delay Opening Orders feature. Please make sure that your Max Equity setting under Edit Trade Settings is less than or equal to your Trade King account's buying power. For example, a cash account that is dedicated only to Trade Ideas should be set no higher than 100%. A margin account should be set under 200%.

I would like to add a note about cash accounts. Currently, the system will submit Opening Orders to be purchased with Unsettled Funds. These will get rejected by TradeKing's Order Management System via Strategic Trade Ideas.

However, you may be able to submit those orders through the TradeKing site. You would get a warning (that you must click through) saying you are buying with Unsettled Funds and will need to hold until these securities until Settlement Date (3 business days) before they can be sold. 

As a result, the system may see something to trigger a Closing Order for a security bought with Unsettled Funds prior to settlement date, but will get rejected by TradeKing's Order Management System (to prevent the account from going on 90-Day Restriction). You would then have to close the trade (if you choose to do so) manually after the trade is settled.

I submitted a request to the Nirvana team to add a setting for clients to choose if they want Opening Trades to only be purchased with Settled Funds on cash accounts. This should be a good feature for clients who do not monitor their accounts daily.

I will update everyone when we have an ETA when that feature will be added.