First of all, if every time you have predicted a stock would go lower, it did, maybe you should have sold short immediately Maybe you should be a day trader! (Or maybe we just had a bear market...)


That aside, the question is not whether a limit order was filled, but whether your ultimate fill (or not) was at a better price than it would have been had you simply waited and used a market order. Do you think whomever hit your bid lost money in the next three seconds?


The trick is that every time, you bought at a lower price than where you would have bought had you entered a market order at the same time as the limit order. Therefore, it looks "cheap." But that's silly.


And since every one of your limit orders has been filled, you have either A) left them in a loooong time, B) cancel-replaced them repeatedly until they hit, C) you haven't placed that many limit orders, D) your prices were always very close to the last tick, or E) you have gotten lucky - no matter how good you are!


Anyway, without getting too deep into it...


...aaaah, I won't get too deep into it


Forget it!


Just let it stand that there IS an illusion.


That having been said, using limit orders, I once bought THE high tick and sold THE low tick in the elctronic S&P future two days in a row. And they were big range days. Odds of that were somewhere between 1:4,000,000 and 1:12,000,000 under the particular circumstances - meaning I got lucky, no matter how good I am.


loudmouth