My strategy involves buying and selling with limit orders. I've been trading penny stocks -- some of which have a price well below a dollar. I noticed that my orders were being placed with round numbers, like $0.52, which was a problem because, at this price point even a tenth of a cent has makes a big percentage difference.

So, I went into the preferences, found the advanced settings panel, and set decimal places to 4. This had the desired result of placing more precise orders, at $0.5233 for example, however, now I'm seeing this error on some of the limit orders: "price does not conform to the minimum price variation for this contract".

Since the preference settings have a global effect in WLD, I'm guessing that I need to make a decision upfront about trading only penny stocks OR only those of a higher price, and then setting the decimal places accordingly.... or is there a better way of solving this problem?

QUOTE:
"price does not conform to the minimum price variation for this contract"

This message is coming from Interactive Brokers via the IB broker provider you're using. I expect that you could customize the decimal places preference on a per symbol basis using the Symbol Manager with its flexible regex rules. More details in the User Guide > Reference > Symbol Info Manager. In this case, penny stocks (if you can differentiate them) would have their decimals set to 4 and the rest to 2.

Okay, thanks, I'll look into using the symbol manager to do this then.