The channel publishes a price. What you type into the order ticket decides whether that price becomes a position, a worse position, or nothing at all, and each choice fails in its own way.
Which decision is actually yours here?
One: how the order reaches the exchange. The pair, the direction, the entry and the exit arrived in the message. The order type is the only field the channel cannot fill in for you, and it decides whether the trade you read about becomes the trade you own.
It gets treated as a formality. In fact it separates three different trades: a fill at the published price, a fill several tenths of a percent worse, and no position at all. In our corpus the last of those is the most common outcome of a published call, though usually because price ran away from the entry rather than because the order sat unfilled at it.
This piece covers the entry side. What the exit side asks of you is a separate problem with its own failure modes, and it is worked through in Why half of signals come without a stop loss.
What does a market order do to a signal entry?
It guarantees you a position and guarantees nothing about the price. A market order takes whatever the order book is offering, from the top down, until your size is filled.
That is a reasonable trade in a calm market with a deep book. It is an expensive one in the situation a signal creates, because the message that told you about the trade told everyone else at the same moment. Binance Academy describes the mechanic: a market order walks up the book when liquidity is thin, and thin is exactly what the book becomes when a broadcast lands on a mid-cap pair.
Two costs arrive together. The fill price drifts away from the published entry, and the taker fee applies because you took liquidity rather than provided it. Neither appears in the channel's record, because the channel's record is computed from the price it published.
The honest description of a market order on a signal is that you are buying certainty of execution with an unknown amount of money.
What does a limit order at the published entry do?
The opposite. It fixes your price and leaves your execution in doubt, and the doubt is larger than most followers expect.
A limit order rests in the book and fills only when three conditions hold. Binance documents all three (Why Wasn't My Limit Order Filled?):
- The market price reaches your limit price or better.
- There is sufficient liquidity at that price.
- There is sufficient time for the order to execute.
Followers assume the first condition is the whole test, when in our own data it is the one that fails most often: price simply never comes back. Conditions two and three matter for a different reason, because everyone reading the same message queues at the same price at the same moment, and our replay cannot see depth or queue position at all.
The scale of the first condition failing is not marginal. Of 3,167 replayed outcomes as of 7 August 2026, 1,554 - 49.1% - are cancelled: price reached the profit target before the published entry ever filled. That is a measure of price running away, and says nothing about liquidity, which our replay does not observe. That figure carries its caveat everywhere we quote it, since one high-volume channel supplies 1,197 of them and across the other sixteen publishers the rate is 21.9%. The full breakdown is in Half the trades never happen.
Why does everyone's order sit at the same price?
Because the message named one number, and an order book fills in the order it received things. That queue has a rule, and the rule is public.
Coinbase's developer documentation describes a "continuous first-come, first-serve order book" in which "Orders are executed in price-time priority as received by the matching engine" (Coinbase Exchange matching engine). Price first, then arrival time. Everyone at the published entry has the same price, so the tie is broken by who got there first.
That produces a specific and unpleasant shape for a follower. If price only touches the entry briefly, the orders that fill are the ones already resting when it arrives. A subscriber reading the message four minutes late sits behind everyone who read it instantly, and behind whoever placed an order before the message went out at all.
The practical consequence is that a limit order placed late is not the same instrument as a limit order placed early, even at an identical price.
What does our own replay assume you used?
A limit order at the published entry, filling whenever the candle's range touches that price. That assumption is generous, and it is worth stating plainly because it means our figures describe a follower who did better than a real one.
Binance's own documentation says why the assumption flatters:
"During periods of high volatility, your order may not be able to reach the end of the order book for execution, even if the market price reaches your limit price." - Binance, Why Wasn't My Limit Order Filled?
So an unknown share of the entries we scored as filled would not have filled for a real subscriber, especially the ones published into fast moves, which is when signal channels post. Our 49.1% cancelled rate is therefore a floor rather than a ceiling. The rest of what our replay assumes, and what it can and cannot establish, is on the Methodology page and in What a backtest can and cannot prove.
What is a stop-limit entry and when does a signal need one?
It is a resting instruction that only becomes an order when price reaches a trigger, and signals need it when the entry sits on the wrong side of the current price.
Two common signal shapes call for it. A breakout entry above the market, where the call is to buy strength rather than a dip, and a short entry below the market on the same logic. A plain limit order at those prices would fill immediately at a better price than intended, which is not what the call meant.
Binance Academy states the trade-off for the exit side, and it applies equally at entry: "If the market price moves rapidly and gaps past the limit price, the limit order won't be filled" (Binance Academy). A stop-limit protects you from a bad price by accepting the possibility of no price.
That is the whole of order-type selection in one sentence. Every type is a choice about which failure you prefer.
Which type fits which kind of call?
There is no type that fills reliably at a good price, so the table below is about which risk you are choosing rather than which option is correct.
| Order type | Fills? | Price? | Where it fits a signal | How it fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Market | Yes, effectively always | Unknown, worse in thin books | Entry already passed and you have decided to chase anyway | Slippage plus taker fee, both invisible in the channel's record |
| Limit at the published entry | Only if price returns and depth remains | Fixed, or better | The call's entry sits away from the current price | Never fills; you watch the move without a position |
| Limit slightly worse than published | More often | Fixed, slightly worse | The entry is close and you want the trade more than the exact price | You have changed the trade the channel will grade itself on |
| Stop-limit | Only after the trigger, and only if the limit is reachable | Bounded | Breakout entries on the far side of the market | Gaps past the limit and leaves you flat |
| Stop-market | Yes, after the trigger | Unknown | Same, when execution matters more than price | Slippage on the trigger, worst in fast markets |
The middle row is the one nobody talks about and most people quietly use. Placing a limit a few ticks worse than the published entry raises your fill probability and puts you in a different trade from the one being advertised, which is fine as long as you are the one keeping score afterwards.
What changes when the entry is a zone?
Your order becomes several orders, and your average price becomes something you chose rather than something the channel published. "Enter between 0.412 and 0.418" is a range, and a range is not an instruction until you decide how to fill it.
Three approaches, each with a different failure. One order at the best edge of the zone fills least often. One order at the worst edge fills most often and gives away the whole zone. Splitting the size across the range fills partially, which means the position you end up with is smaller than the one you sized for and your effective entry is an average nobody published.
That last case interacts badly with sizing, because the stop distance you calculated was measured from a price you did not get. How to convert a stop distance into a size is in Position sizing when the trade idea is not yours.
What about the exit orders?
They should exist before you need them, and on most venues they can be attached as a pair where the first to trigger cancels the other (Kraken, conditional orders). A ladder of six targets, which is the most common shape in our corpus as of 7 August 2026, is six separate exit instructions plus a stop.
That arrangement has one property worth knowing before it surprises you: each partial exit changes the size behind the remaining stop, so a position that started correctly sized ends up as a smaller position facing the same invalidation level.
The exit side also carries its own execution risk, distinct from anything above. A triggered stop-market fills at whatever is available, which in a fast market can be far from the trigger price. The evidence for that, and what it does to a follower's result, is in Why half of signals come without a stop loss.
What this does not prove
None of this says which order type you should use. It says what each one does and which failure each one accepts, and the right answer depends on the call, the pair's liquidity and how late you read the message. Nothing here is financial advice.
The mechanics described here are common to major venues, and the specifics differ. Order type names, available time-in-force settings, fee treatment of maker and taker fills, and trigger behaviour all vary between exchanges and change with product releases. Read your own venue's documentation for the ticket you are actually using; the sources below are the ones we could verify.
Our figures describe our index as of 7 August 2026: 3,227 parsed signals from 17 publishing accounts of 50 indexed, resolving to 3,167 outcomes. That is not a random sample of the market, the cancelled rate is dominated by one publisher, and every figure moves as the replay catches up.
Nothing here alleges misconduct by any channel. Publishing an entry that the market runs away from is not wrongdoing, and no channel controls the order book.
The practical read
Three questions decide the ticket, and you can answer all three before typing anything.
Where is price now relative to the published entry? Am I willing to hold no position at all if it does not come back? And if I widen my price to get filled, am I still in the trade the channel is going to grade itself on?
Current ratings for the channels we can score are at Signal Providers.