Why didn't my pending order fill when price touched it?

You placed a Buy Limit at 1.0850. The chart shows price reached 1.0849. The order never filled,
and price ran away without you.

There is almost always a technical reason, and the four below account for nearly every case.

1. The chart is drawn from Bid; buy orders fill on Ask

The most common cause by far. MT4 and MT5 draw candles from the Bid price by
default. But buy orders — Buy Limit and Buy Stop alike — fill at the Ask, which is
always higher than the Bid by exactly the spread.

So for a Buy Limit at 1.0850 to fill, the Bid has to reach 1.0850 minus the spread. At a
1.2 pip spread, the Bid must touch 1.0838. A candle low of 1.0849 is not close enough.

The fix: enable the Ask line on your chart. The gap becomes visible and the
surprise disappears.

2. The spread widened at that exact moment

Spreads are not fixed. Around news, at the Asian open, and at session changeovers they
widen considerably. The gap described
above grows with them, and pending orders become harder to fill.

The reverse applies to sell orders, where a wide spread can fill you earlier
than expected — the same mechanism behind
stops swept by candles that never touched them.

3. The order expired

If you set an expiry on the pending order, it cancels itself at that time — even if price arrives
minutes later. Check the History tab: a cancelled order sits there, not in the Trade tab.

4. Not enough free margin

A pending order fills only if you have enough
free margin at that moment. If open
positions have absorbed it, the pending order is rejected even at the right price.

A frequent version of this: you place several pending orders at once, the first fills and takes
the margin, and the rest have no room left.

Quick reference

Placing pending orders that work

• Add the spread to your level on buy orders, or simply turn on the Ask line and
  place against that.
• Leave a margin of error rather than sitting exactly on a round number — that is
  where spreads widen most.
• Check free margin before placing several pending orders at once.
• Consider dropping the expiry if your trade idea is not tied to a specific
  window.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Conditions and fee levels are published by the brokers and can change at any time — check with the broker you actually use. Leveraged forex and CFD trading carries a high level of risk and can cost you your entire deposit.