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The price you see is the price of the first few shares, not all of them. This chapter explains why a big order costs more per share than a small one, what slippage is, and how Kairos keeps a retry from quietly filling you at a worse price.

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How Orders Get Filled

When you place an order, the exchange tries to match you with the other side. The way your order fills depends on what’s sitting on the order book.

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Buying Up (Walking the Book)

When you buy more shares than are available at the best price, your order walks up the book — filling at progressively higher prices. Example: You market buy 200 shares. Your average price: **0.562∗∗insteadof0.562** instead of 0.55. That $0.012 difference is slippage.

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Selling Down

The same thing happens when you sell — your order walks down the book through the bids, filling at progressively lower prices. Example: You sell 300 shares at market:

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What Is Slippage?

Slippage is the difference between the price you expected and the price you actually got.
Slippage = Actual Price - Expected Price
Example: You expected to buy at 0.55,butyouraveragefillwas0.55, but your average fill was 0.562: Slippage happens when:
  • Your order is large relative to the depth at the best price
  • The market is thin (not much liquidity)
  • The market moves between when you place and when it fills

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How to Reduce Slippage

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Partial Fills

Sometimes your order only partially fills. This happens when:
  • There aren’t enough shares at your limit price
  • You’re using IOC and only some shares are available
  • Another trader grabbed shares at the same price before you
Example: Buy 100 at $0.55, IOC — only 60 available. Filled: 60 shares at $0.55 | Unfilled: 40 shares (cancelled)
With GTC, the unfilled 40 would rest on the book and wait.

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Retries

Sometimes an order doesn’t fill on the first attempt — the exchange is momentarily busy, a network blip, or someone else grabbed the shares before you. When this happens, Kairos automatically retries within your slippage bounds:
  • Kairos re-sends the order to the exchange automatically — usually within milliseconds
  • Your slippage tolerance is respected — retries never fill at a worse price than you’ve accepted
  • If the price has moved outside your slippage bounds, the retry stops and the order fails rather than filling at a bad price
How Kairos does this:
  • You authorise the band by sending max_slippage_cents (1–99) with the order.
  • Re-pricing always starts from your original price, plus that budget — never from the previous retry’s price, so repeated retries cannot ratchet upward.
  • A retry is only issued when it moves toward the current touch. If the market has left your authorised band, the order stops with a SlippageExceeded error naming your limit.
  • Without max_slippage_cents there is nothing to re-price against, so a failed attempt is simply re-sent unchanged.
  • Retries are budgeted. max_retries (0–20, after the first attempt) caps how many are attempted.
  • Only failures a better price could plausibly fix earn a re-price. Network errors, timeouts, and rate limits never reached the matching engine, so Kairos re-sends those unchanged rather than spending your slippage budget on its own flakiness.

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Price Impact — The Bigger Picture

Every trade moves the market slightly. When you buy, you remove asks and push the price up. When you sell, you remove bids and push the price down. This is called price impact. You consumed the $0.55 level. Large orders have more price impact — this is why institutional traders often split large orders into smaller pieces.

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Key Takeaways

  • Market orders trade fast but may slip
  • Limit orders prevent slippage but may not fill
  • Depth matters — always check how much is available
  • Bigger orders = more slippage and price impact
  • Retries are normal — they happen automatically
Next: Positions & PnL — what you’re holding once the order fills, and how the profit is counted.