This morning I ordered 20,000+ shares of HPOL. That's about $22,000. I was hoping it would fill quickly, but the BUY order has been open for 45 minutes now, and the price of HPOL has risen from $1.10 to $1.25 in the mean time. I would have liked to take that profit.  I was hoping to jump in and out really quickly.

In the past I've been more of an investor than a trader. I've never paid attention to how long it takes an order to process before. And if the stock rose a few cents in before the order filled, then oh well, just water under the bridge. But I'm practicing day trading now, and I'm starting to wonder how long this should take...

How quickly should a BUY order be filled? Does it take usually take 45 minutes (or more)? Is the delay happening because I bought such a huge order?

There has to be an equal amount of shares traded in real life. For example at 11am today only 35,000 shares have traded in the stock you are talking about so you should be out by now but I am sure it took a while to fill 20,000 in real life. 

 yup. there has to be an amount more than that u are trading for.. in real. so u cant for example trade 10 shares of xyz if there are only 9 traded in real life today

 Ahhh, I get it. So it would be safer to trade in small increments, like 50 or 20 shares per trade. Thanks guys.

Be careful, you get charged a commision for every trade.

coast:

Be careful, you get charged a commision for every trade.

Yeah, that's why I tried to do such a large quantity in just one order. If I split it into just three smaller orders, I'd suddenly have $60 in fees. 

GCMan:

There has to be an equal amount of shares traded in real life. For example at 11am today only 35,000 shares have traded in the stock you are talking about so you should be out by now but I am sure it took a while to fill 20,000 in real life. 

I learned an important lesson about volume from this: the higher the volume, the easier it is to jump in and out.

For other newbies like me out there, take a look at the bottom area of the chart, to the little mini chart labeled "Volume" and see if what you're trading in is in the thousands or millions. The higher the volume, the easier it is to buy and sell. If the volume is particularly low (let's say 20,000) than try to make sure you buy less than that amount of shares.

Here's a short lecture (2:35 min) that briefly talks about trading in relation to volume and time of day (it's also a sales pitch for a trading platform, but just ignore that): http://www.lightspeed.com/TraderTalkVideoSeries.php?vid=1

 If it has high volume it will fill faster

If you pay $60.00 for 3 trades, I would find a cheaper broker for starters.  That would be $120.00 to get out also.

If you watch the volume and it is high, a market trade would go through fairly quickly, if you want to pay market price.

 Als, if a stock has average volume of 25000 shares traded per day and you place an order of 100000 shares, then you might not get it filled if at all.

OK