Question about limit orders not triggering

[carnitron]

On two tickers I tested today, BIL and USFR, my limits do not trigger. Ever. Even when done with 1 share. Live, in simulation, or in playback. The price can literally be sitting on my limit as the seconds and minutes tick by and nothing happens. This same code works just fine on every other ticker I've tried it with.

What is going on?

My orders do get accepted, so it's not like the broker is rejecting my orders outright.

Is there something about these tickers that I could inspect via an NT8 API that would enable me to identify why these tickers can't be traded with limits?

Market orders work just fine when executed manually from the NT8 chart window.

Perhaps it's worth noting that these are both treasury ETFs. Yes, they are thinly traded, but I've confirmed through TradingView that there's more than enough volume to ensure that my limits should be hit eventually.

Is it possible that the volume I'm seeing is actually internal trades by the ETF management servers in response to movement in the treasuries, and not retail-side engagement of the ETF shares? So what appears to be enough volume to handle my limits is in fact near zero volume, from the external retail side? (I'm just wildly speculating here, not sure if this is even a thing.)

[NinjaTrader_Manfred]

Hello carnitron,

Thank you very much for your post.

Could you send me the log & trace files in question? I would like to take a closer look at what might cause this behavior.

You can do this by going to the Control Center -> Help -> Email Support

Please select "Platform Technical Support" as the recipient and enter a brief note in the message referring to this case.

Please also include the Order ID of one of the orders affected.

Thank you in advance, I look forward to your reply!

[carnitron]

Ok email sent! FYI, I had to force quit out of the first email send, b/c I did not uncheck "Log and trace files", and it looks like the dialog was trying to send all of them, which is a truly enormous amount of unnecessary data that I should just delete to free up SSD space. So if there are 2 emails, the 2nd one is what you want.

Thanks for looking at this!

[carnitron]

So after reaching out to TDA multiple times and not getting any answers, I actually figured out what is going on here on my own.

BIL and USFR have huge limit order queues on either side of the spread. Since market maker liquidity doesn't show up in the order book, I suspect we are seeing enemy algos.

In other words, my limit orders do get accepted, but they get put at the end of these huge queues and then only very rarely get executed, b/c there are tens of thousands of shares worth of orders ahead of them on an ongoing basis.

Guess I'm not the first person to have this idea, lol.

[NinjaTrader_Zachary]

Hello carnitron,

Thank you for your response.

We appreciate that you've updated the thread for other users who may be running into a similar situation!

[carnitron]

Of course!