Place a stop-loss-market (SL-M) order

SL-M triggers at trigger_price and becomes a market order — no price field, no limit ambiguity. This guarantees a fill, at the cost of no control over the exact exit price.

order_id = kite.place_order(
    variety="regular",
    exchange="NSE",
    tradingsymbol="INFY",
    transaction_type="SELL",
    quantity=10,
    product="MIS",
    order_type="SL-M",
    trigger_price=1450.00,
    validity="DAY",
)

SL vs SL-M — the actual tradeoff, stated plainly

For most risk-management stop-losses, SL-M is the safer default — the entire point of a stop-loss is capping loss, and an unfilled SL order in a fast-moving adverse market defeats that purpose completely. A worse-than-expected fill from SL-M is still a bounded, known-direction loss; an unfilled SL is unbounded.

def place_protective_stop(kite, exchange, symbol, qty, trigger_price, product="MIS", exit_side="SELL"):
    return kite.place_order(
        variety="regular", exchange=exchange, tradingsymbol=symbol,
        transaction_type=exit_side, quantity=qty, product=product,
        order_type="SL-M", trigger_price=trigger_price, validity="DAY",
    )

Trigger price must respect exchange-mandated minimum distance

Exchanges enforce a minimum gap between trigger_price and the current LTP for SL/SL-M orders (to prevent instant-trigger orders that behave like disguised market orders) — placing a trigger too close to current price gets rejected. Check the rejection message (chapter 57) rather than assuming any trigger price is valid.

Always place the SL-M immediately after entry fills, never as an afterthought

If your bot's logic path is "enter position, then later decide on a stop," there's a window where the position sits completely unprotected. Chapter 88's state machine pattern places the protective order as part of the same atomic step as confirming entry fill — not a separate, delayed step.

Next: 052 — Bracket and cover orders