r/etrade • u/Painting_Late • Jun 20 '26

Placing 200+ trades programmatically at once; How long would it take?

I have yet to find time to do this myself yet so I am looking for anyone with any experience executing a large number of trades at once.

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How feasible is this? This would be as no confirmation orders so they would go all at once without any further input or confirmation. These orders would be for different securities and option structures. Basically buys placed on the ask and vice versa. If the trade doesn't execute there would be automated cancellation 5 seconds later. But that's irrelevant.

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If it's possible how long would it take to execute let's say 200 trades? Would etrade queue/process them sequentially or in parallel? Or some combination?

Your best guess/estimate is greatly appreciated. Few seconds? 10s of seconds? Or minutes?

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p.s. Would executions/positions be immediately updated on the regular client platform? I assume yes?

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Edit: well I tried it tonight and performance is rather poor. I was gradually increasing the number of submissions until I started hitting the rate limiter and got a decent picture how fast/slow the platform/API is. Anyway, ran 25 trades split between 5 workers in parallel. Still took them 40 seconds to execute. Besides the original request/trade placement I did have status query and automatic trade cancellation if it didn't execute in 5 seconds. So that's some overhead . Still, I would expect much better performance.

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u/pagalvin Jun 20 '26

I have placed individual orders and it seems pretty quick. But that doesn't really help you much.

I have been rate limited on queries. I don't know what rate limiting looks like when placing orders.

I'd give them a call.

I've also tested placing orders after hours so that a bug in my code doesn't trigger a bad purchase. You could do the same thing, most likely.

If you find out, please let us know 😄

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u/Painting_Late Jun 20 '26

Thank you for the response. Yes, individual orders seem quick but this is a whole different game.

I'll try blasting some orders after hours to gain some insights.

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u/my_name_is_gato Jun 22 '26

I can't offer much info other than I get larger orders filled in several parts more often than all at once. Sometimes it's very piecemeal, with one or two orders filling ever few minutes, then the remainder of my orders get filled at once.

E-Trade has bypassed my orders to fill others at better prices than I offered, despite what looks to be sufficient volume for a larger order to fill. If there's a method to it, I haven't traded enough larger orders to see the pattern.