I’m just starting to learn about investing and today (Monday 29/09/2025) was my first real step: I funded and launched my first pie on Trading 212. I placed the order over the weekend, so it was automatically executed this morning as soon as the LSE opened.
At the end of the day, after the market closed, I checked my pie and noticed that most positions were showing unrealised losses — even though the market prices of those same stocks had gone up during the day.
All my investments (7 different stocks) had underperformed their respective market values by roughly 1% today. I don’t think this is due to order execution timing, since that would likely cause mixed results (some up, some down), but in this case all of them are trailing the market price.
I’ve attached some screenshots and values to help illustrate what I’m seeing.
I’d really appreciate your help understanding where these differences in performance are coming from — whether it’s related to ETF pricing, FX exposure, platform execution, or something else I’m missing.
Hello there and congratulations on starting your investment journey!
The discrepancy you notice is due to your buy order getting the first available opening price (11,543 in your second screenshot), while the closing price was lower (11,517), but the day’s return is computed from Friday’s closing price, which was lower than Monday’s opening.
Thank you for your kind words and helpful response.
I believe you’re right—the purchasing price was noticeably higher across all the stocks in my pie compared to their opening prices, which I didn’t expect.
However, I’m still a bit confused. I’m planning to set up an automatic daily contribution to my pie (as part of a long-term investment strategy), therefore I want to make sure I understand what’s going on with that and that placing orders at market open doesn’t work against me.
Are overnight orders, which execute at market open, typically filled at prices higher than the official opening price (in more than 50% of cases)?
Would it be wiser to delay the orders by an hour or so to avoid the volatility often seen at market open? (As far as I know, Trading 212 doesn’t allow time-based order scheduling.)
No, not generally. You may very well have gotten the '“official opening price” too, as you would call it - the first trading price will usually be different to the last closing price. Depending on market conditions and trading venues, T212’s orders will usually execute at market open or soon thereafter.
For any kind of long term investing, this will not matter. Any intra-day price is as good a gamble to opening’s price. For very short-lived trades though, market openings tend to be highly (or higher) volatile periods, and are best avoided.
Hi, again.
There seems to actually be a trend for the prices to gap up during night so more expensive at opening. This might also be amplified for certain ETFs due to lower liquidity.
