What happens after you press the "buy" button

Pressing the "buy" button does not buy the security. It sends an instruction to your broker, the broker passes an order to the exchange, the order joins the order book and waits for a counterparty, and the security becomes yours not at the moment of the trade but after clearing and an entry in your custody account. Time passes between these events, and almost every misunderstanding around a first trade lives in exactly that gap: the money is already reserved, something has changed in the app, yet ownership has not yet passed to you.

An instruction, not a purchase

You do not trade on the exchange directly — you give an instruction to a licensed market participant that has access to trading. The broker checks the instruction: whether you have enough free cash, whether the instrument is available to you, whether the relevant trading mode is open right now. If the checks pass, the order goes into the trading system under the broker's identifier, and in your interface it gets the status "active". As long as that is the status, there is no trade — only a commitment to buy on the stated terms.

So the first thing to do before placing an order is to open the instrument page and make sure it is exactly the security you mean: SBER. Tickers of similar issues can differ by a single letter, and the list of securities and trading modes is easier to browse in the stocks section.

The order book: who you are really trading with

The exchange does not sell you the security. It matches your order with an opposing order from another participant. All active orders sit in the book, sorted by price: bids from the top down, asks from the bottom up. A trade happens when the bid price reaches the ask price.

This explains half of a beginner's surprise: the price you saw on the chart is the price of the last completed trade, not the price at which yours will be filled. Yours will be filled at the prices of the opposing orders sitting in the book right now. In a liquid security the difference is unnoticeable; in a thinly traded one it shows up immediately.

Market and limit orders: what you pay for speed

A market order says: "fill immediately at the best available prices." It is almost always filled, but you do not control the price — a large order can "eat through" several levels of the book and be filled in parts at different prices. The final price of the trade will be the average across those parts.

A limit order says: "no higher than this price." You control the price but not the execution: if no matching offers appear at your price, the order will simply stay in the book until the end of the session or until you cancel it.

A separate reason for an order not being filled is the lot. The exchange sets a lot size for each security, and an order for less than one lot will simply fail the check. With bonds there is also accrued coupon interest: you pay the seller not only the price but also the portion of the coupon that has built up since the last payment — this is shown in the bonds section.

Clearing and settlement: when the security becomes yours

Once the orders are matched, the clearing house steps in. It calculates the net mutual obligations of all participants for the trading day and settles them: money leaves your side, securities arrive. The record that the security is now yours is made by the depository — the central securities depository records the issue as a whole, while your broker's depository maintains your custody account.

Importantly, settlement in the main trading modes does not happen the second the trade is made but with a delay — on the next trading day. The exact timelines for each mode and your broker's fees are set out in the broker's rules; the site does not have that data, and there is no need to make it up here. But the consequence of deferred settlement is universal: the trade date and the date on which ownership passes are different dates.

Why this matters for dividends

The right to a payout goes to whoever is listed as the owner on the record date. Because ownership passes with a delay, buying the stock "on the record date" is already too late — what you need is the last day to buy, and it comes earlier. A related concept is the last trading day, which concerns the lifespan of the instrument itself, not the payout.

What the portfolio shows in the first hour

Right after the trade, the portfolio almost always looks worse than expected, and the reasons are mundane. The broker's and the exchange's commissions have been added to the price. If you bought with a market order, you bought at the ask price, while the position is valued at the current price — the spread puts you in the red straight away. For bonds, the accrued interest you paid is included in the valuation.

The tax base for securities transactions is calculated on sale, not on purchase — for the legal basis, see 13%. In other words, a purchase on its own creates no tax consequences.

If the order was not filled

Check in this order: is the trading mode open, is the size not below one lot, has the price not moved away from your limit, is there enough free cash once the commission is taken into account, has trading in the security not been suspended. Suspension and removal from the listing are a separate story: what to do in case of delisting.

What to write down straight away

While you still remember why you bought, write down: the instrument, the order type, the reason for the purchase and the condition under which you will close the position. A month from now your memory will have constructed a convenient version of events, and there will be nothing left to analyse — more on this in the trading journal. And when the price moves against you, the order in which you ask yourself questions matters more than how fast you react: the stock has fallen.