Bitcoin Forum

Placed an order to sell 12 BTC this morning about 10 hours ago and its still in the Open Order section. How long to actually complete the sell? Thanks

depends on the price you placed the order at.
for instance if you put the price at $12k each. you will have to wait for the markets to even get to $12k to even get to your order.
th top price was about $9027 so if you put your order to sell at anything higher. you have to wait for th market to get to your price

if you put an order BELOW the current market rate then it should have sold instantly

its not an auction house where the highest bidder wins or they match speculators at different prices. its market rate of live trades based on the market price.

To complete the sale you should not take too long, and you have 10 hours to run, and I think it will soon sell, if it should be 1 hour fast already sold.

It depends on when someone is willing to buy your coins at that price. Basically, your order is in the market providing liquidity for buyers. They need to buy all the sell orders in front of yours before they start buying yours. First come first serve basis. There is no way of telling when the order will get filled, the price could crash and it could be years before it gets hit. Or it could skyrocket and hit your order instantly, it always depends on the volatility of Bitcoin.

Ok that makes more sense, placed order to sell at the current price at the time of $8979 this morning and price has dropped a good bit since then. Every time i make a sell its always at the current price and went theough fast but i guess this time the price drop happened too fast

So I'm going to guess you didn't use a market order, as that would have made the trade go through instantly. You most likely went to trying to use some sort of limit order ( or something of that nature) and your trade didn't go through as the market moved around.

Could we see exactly what your order looks like in order to further help ya out with this problem. Wouldn't want someone trying to buy / sell 13 btc and it not work for them!

All i did was wait until the price hit a certain amount then manually place the sell but looks like the time it took me to login and make the sell the price dropped and left my order open until the price goes back up. In gonna start using the limits to automatically trigger the sells and buys so i dont have to deal with this sort of stuff. Im still new and didnt want to do that but if it means missing out on my profits if i dont then i will of course

Using limits is a great strategy when it comes to trading. That is how I exclusively trade, just by placing the buy and sell limits. It can seem a little overwhelming when you are new at first, but you will get the hang of it very quickly!

Depends on market conditions, and how much you placed the sell order for.

If your sell order is above the current market price then expect it to stay open for a while, because there are no guarantees that bitcoin go up. This has nothing to do with poloniex, since they don't control the actual trades.

If your ultimate aim is to sell your BTC as quickly as possible without any sort of expectation of BTC going up any further, then just place a sell order at the current highest bid price. You'll get slightly worse than market price, but it's instantaneous.

As you know by now, there are no "time limits" or timeframes as to when your order is executed. It's not up to poloniex for your order to be partially or fully filled.

Just to clarify, the last price on the exchange isn't necessarily the highest price on the bid end of the orderbook. It could have been someone taking an order from the ask end of the orderbook, and if you just put a sell order in at the last price of an exchange it's not always guaranteed that it's going to be instant.

I agree with squatz1, use a market order if you want the trade to go through instantly, although expect a lower exchange rate for your BTC than if you put a limit sell and waited a little.