When placing orders on the MT4 platform, you have 2 basic order types. Market orders will execute as soon as you specify buy or sell. These market orders do not allow you to specify a stop loss or take profit as part of your order. After a market order executes, you can modify the order to put in a stop loss and/or take profit.
The other order type is Pending Orders. A pending order is waiting for a condition to be met before the order executes. The condition is based on what you specify as a price. In other words, the currency pair has to reach a certain price before it will execute.
There are two pending order types: limit and stop. In either case, you can choose to buy or sell. The idea behind a limit order is that you are seeking a better price for the currency pair than the current price. A buy limit would be buying, but only if you can buy at a cheaper price. A sell limit would be selling, but only if you can sell at a higher price.
The buy stop and sell stop are not to be confused with a stop loss order. A stop order would be looking for more of a confirmation before entering the trade. A buy stop would be buying at a higher price than currently, but that higher price would be your tradeoff in seeing a stronger move higher. A sell stop would be selling at a lower price than currently, but again the tradeoff would be waiting for a stronger move lower.
With the pending orders, you have the ability to specify a stop loss and take profit as part of your order. The pending order will stay open until the specified price is reached. You can also specify an expiration time for a pending order. A pending order can be setup to only be valid until a certain date. Once that date is reached, the order will expire. At any time, you can modify a pending order to put in different prices that need to be reached as well as modifying your stop loss or take profit or the expiration of the order. You can also delete the order at any time.
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