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Mechanism library · English

Why orders get rejected

Price bands, margins, lot sizes, quantity freezes, trade-to-trade segments — the mechanical reasons an order never reaches the market.

The price is outside the band

Every stock trades inside a price band the exchange sets — the price may move only so far in a day. An order whose limit price lies outside that band is rejected at the exchange, not by your broker. The band is a property of the stock, and it changes: the exchange widens and narrows bands, and a stock in a trade-to-trade segment gets different rules entirely.

A rejection is a fact about a gate, not a judgement of the trade.

GateTypical reason the order never leaves
Risk engineVelocity, size, or symbol restriction
Broker / RMSMargin short, freeze, or product mismatch
ExchangePrice band, tick size, or freeze quantity
Algo-IDEmpty or unregistered identifier

Margin is short

An order carries a margin requirement the moment it is placed. If the account does not hold the required margin — cash or pledged collateral — the order is rejected before it is routed. This is not a punishment and not a penalty; it is the exchange's risk system declining to accept an obligation the account has not funded.

Quantity rules

The exchange defines a lot size per instrument and a freeze quantity beyond which a single order is not accepted — both exist so that no single order can move a market accidentally. An order that is not a multiple of the lot size, or larger than the freeze limit, is rejected mechanically, regardless of how much money is in the account.

Rejections are information

A rejection tells you the market's machinery declined your order for a mechanical reason. The reason code says which one. Reading it instead of retrying blindly is the difference between fixing the order and hammering a rule that will not move. Every rejection reason on this platform is recorded and displayed as it arrived — never rewritten into something softer.

Related

This page describes how the market’s machinery works. It does not recommend buying or selling any security, and it does not say where any price is going. Nothing here is personalised investment advice.