Gatehub exchange vs trade

[c141medic]

I recently used Gatehub to submit a sell order using their “trade” option. To my surprise,  what I thought was a stop loss sell order executed immediately rather than   executing at the price I had indicated. The price I wanted to sell at was 2.15, in case the price dipped down too low. Instead it was immediately filled at the current rate of 2.47. I had also set up a buy order at around 2. So, I’m not sure what the difference there is between using their exchange vs trade? I think I’m going to transfer my assets to Poloniex as it seems they have more robust trading options rather than the limited options Gatehub offers. 

[Burgoyne]

Gatehub is one of the worst. They're undermanned, underfunded and buggy.

[at3n]

@Burgoyne Gatehub indeed has many problems at the moment, but this one is not a bug.

There is no stop loss option on Gatehub, because your orders are executed directly on the XRP Ledger, not a private ledger maintained by Gatehub. On the XRP Ledger there is no concept of adding an order as a stop loss, each order is considered as a standalone offer to exchange one currency for another. If the Ledger can get you a better offer than you ask for, then it will do that.

To implement a stop loss, Gatehub would have to hold off on submitting the order to the XRP Ledger until the market price reached that level, but to do that reliably they would need to have continuous access to your wallet's secret key without you being online to enter your password. This would be a considerable step backwards in terms of security.

The only difference between Exchange and Trade on Gatehub is that the Exchange order will only execute if it can be completely filled by other offers already existing on the ledger (e.g. current market prices). Trade allows you to enter buy orders at or below the current market price, and sell orders at or above the current market price, and they will stay on the ledger until they're fully filled or cancelled. Entering low sells or high buys will result in immediate fulfilment at market prices, as @c141medic discovered.

Edited January 10, 2018 by at3n