A market order instructs a broker to buy or sell a stock immediately at the best price currently available — it prioritizes speed of execution over price.
Market orders are best suited to liquid stocks with a narrow bid-ask spread, where the "best available price" is close to the last traded price and unlikely to move much before the order fills. On a thinly traded name, the same order can walk through several price levels and fill meaningfully worse than expected.
Live example: a market order to buy AAPL right now would fill near its current price of $333.74, not exactly at it — see the full AAPL forecast for its current bid-ask context.
The trade-off is speed vs. price control: a market order fills almost immediately but at whatever price is available; a limit order names a specific price but is not guaranteed to fill at all. Entry and exit plans that specify a target price ("wait for a pullback to $X") are naturally implemented with limit orders, not market orders.
No — it guarantees execution, not price. The fill can differ from the last quoted price, especially on a fast-moving or thinly traded stock (slippage).
To control the price you pay or receive, at the cost of no guaranteed fill — useful when implementing a specific entry or exit plan rather than needing immediate execution.
Yes — the risk of a poor fill (slippage) scales with how wide the stock's bid-ask spread is and how thinly it trades; liquid large-cap names are generally safer for market orders than thinly traded small-caps.
AAPL analysis shows this metric in context, or browse all S&P 500 tickers.
Educational research only — not investment advice.