Orders & Execution Flashcards
20 orders & execution terms, each defined in one line. Flip through to test yourself, mark the ones you know, and open the full glossary entry for the worked example.
TermAskClick to flip · press SpaceTap to flip
DefinitionThe ask (or offer) is the opposite side of the quote from the bid: the lowest price at which any seller is currently willing to part with shares, posted with a size.
All 20 terms in this deck
The full list, for reference and search.
- Ask
- The ask (or offer) is the opposite side of the quote from the bid: the lowest price at which any seller is currently willing to part with shares, posted with a size.
- Bid
- The bid is the highest price a buyer is currently posting for a stock, always paired with a size: a bid of $18.42 x 500 means someone will pay $18.42 for up to 500 shares right now.
- Bid-Ask Spread
- The bid-ask spread is the distance between the best bid and the best ask: a large ETF quoted $452.30 x $452.31 has a 1-cent spread (about 0.002%), while a $4.00 small cap quoted $4.02 x $4.10 has an 8-cent spread, a full 2% of the stock price.
- Dark Pool
- A dark pool is a private trading venue that matches orders without displaying them beforehand.
- Day Order
- A day order dies at the 4:00 pm ET close if it has not filled, in contrast to a GTC order that keeps working across sessions.
- Direct Market Access (DMA)
- Direct market access lets a trader route orders straight to a chosen exchange, ECN, or dark pool instead of letting the broker decide where the order goes.
- ECN (Electronic Communication Network)
- An ECN is an electronic system that matches buy and sell orders directly against each other, with no dealer in the middle.
- Fill
- A fill is the execution of an order: the moment shares actually change hands, stamped with a price, a size, and a time.
- Good Til Canceled (GTC)
- A good til canceled (GTC) order stays working session after session until it fills or you cancel it, though most brokers impose a ceiling of 60-180 days before purging it.
- Hotkeys
- Hotkeys are keyboard shortcuts that fire pre-configured orders instantly: one keystroke to buy 1,000 shares at the ask, another to flatten the entire position, no mouse and no order ticket.
- Limit Order
- A limit order flips the market order's trade-off: it guarantees your price but not your fill.
- Market Maker
- A market maker is a firm that continuously quotes both a buy price and a sell price in a stock, earning the difference between the two.
- Market Order
- A market order executes immediately at the best available price, consuming the order book level by level until the full size is filled.
- Order Book
- The order book is the live ledger of resting limit orders in a stock, buyers stacked at descending prices below the market and sellers at ascending prices above it.
- Partial Fill
- A partial fill occurs when the market can only supply some of your order's size at your price; you receive the shares that were available, and the remainder either keeps working or cancels, depending on the order's time-in-force and instructions.
- Payment for Order Flow (PFOF)
- Payment for order flow is money a wholesale market maker pays a brokerage for routing customer orders to it instead of to an exchange.
- Slippage
- Slippage is the gap between the price you expected and the price you actually received: pay an average of $10.06 on a market buy quoted at $10.02 and you slipped 4 cents a share, $40 on 1,000 shares.
- Stop Order
- A stop order sits dormant until price touches a trigger you set, then converts into a market order.
- Stop-Limit Order
- A stop-limit order swaps the market order inside a plain stop for a limit order, capping how bad the exit price can get, at the cost of possibly not exiting at all.
- Trailing Stop
- A trailing stop follows price at a fixed distance, say $0.50 or 3%, ratcheting the trigger up as the stock rises but never lowering it.