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Sending orders to your broker

How Tradient previews, confirms, and routes orders through SnapTrade — equity and multi-leg options.

8 min readordersexecutionsnaptrade

Tradient sends orders to your broker through SnapTrade. Every order goes through a two-step preview-then-confirm flow so you see exactly what your broker will receive — and so nothing fires by accident. This page explains the flow, order types, and how multi-leg strategies are bundled.

The two-step flow

  1. You click “Place trade” from a Radar result, a Focus mode analysis, or the Portfolio drawer. Tradient builds the order spec and sends it to SnapTrade as a preview.
  2. SnapTrade forwards the preview to your broker. The broker returns a confirmed price, fee estimate, and buying-power impact. Tradient shows you that response on a confirmation screen.
  3. You click “Confirm.” Tradient calls the place-trade endpoint with the preview id. The order goes live at your broker.

Nothing leaves Tradient without your explicit confirm click. There is no “auto-trade” mode and no scheduled order placement.

The preview can expire
SnapTrade preview ids are typically valid for ~5 minutes. If you wait too long to confirm, you’ll get a “preview expired” error and need to start over. The price you confirm at is the price the broker quoted at preview time — if the market moved while you were thinking, the broker may re-quote at fill.

Equity and single-leg options

Single-leg orders go through SnapTrade’s /trade/impact → /trade/{tradeId} flow. The preview returns:

  • Estimated fill price (broker mid or limit)
  • Estimated fees and commissions
  • Buying-power impact
  • Account cash and equity after the trade
  • Any broker warnings (margin call, day-trade flag, etc.)

Multi-leg options strategies

Multi-leg trades use SnapTrade’s optionStrategy endpoints, which bundle the legs into a single broker order so they fill atomically (or not at all). The flow is:

  1. Tradient resolves each leg’s OCC symbol to a broker option id via /accounts/{id}/symbols.
  2. Tradient creates a strategy object via /accounts/{id}/optionStrategy with the legs and a strategy_type label (Iron Condor, Vertical Spread, Straddle, Strangle, Butterfly, or Custom).
  3. We fetch a quote on the strategy to populate the preview screen with broker-confirmed bid/ask/mid and aggregate Greeks.
  4. On confirm, we call execute with the price and time-in-force you set.

If your broker doesn’t natively support the strategy type label, SnapTrade falls back to CUSTOM — which most brokers accept. The legs still fill atomically.

Order types and time-in-force

  • Limit (default for options) — fills at your specified price or better. Tradient pre-fills limit orders to mid by default; you can adjust before confirm.
  • Market — fills immediately at best available. Discouraged for options because of slippage on wide spreads. Tradient warns before allowing.
  • Stop / stop-limit — for closing orders on stock holdings.
  • TIF: Day (default) — order expires at close.
  • TIF: GTC — good until canceled. Use for take-profit or rolling orders you want to leave working.

Order status and reconciliation

After you place a trade, Tradient polls SnapTrade for the order state every few seconds until it terminates (filled, canceled, or rejected). You’ll see:

  • Pending — preview confirmed, broker hasn’t accepted yet.
  • Working — order at the broker, waiting to fill.
  • Partial — some legs filled, others still working.
  • Filled — terminal success state.
  • Canceled / Rejected — terminal failure state with broker reason.

When an order fills, Portfolio refreshes automatically and the new position shows up in the position list. The History tab gets a new entry on the next sync.

Canceling working orders

Working orders show up in a “Open orders” section at the top of Portfolio. Click cancel and Tradient calls /accounts/{id}/orders/cancel on the broker. Cancelation is best-effort — if the order fills before the broker processes the cancel, you keep the fill.

What happens when something goes wrong

  • Preview rejected by broker. The error message comes straight from the broker (insufficient buying power, restricted security, expired option, etc.). Fix the underlying issue and retry.
  • Confirm fails after preview succeeds. Usually a stale preview. Start over.
  • Partial fill that won’t complete. Cancel the working portion and either accept the partial or close it manually. Tradient surfaces this state with a banner.
  • Broker is offline. SnapTrade returns 503 and Tradient retries with backoff. If your broker is down for maintenance, no new orders can be placed.

Where to go next