GLOSSARY // Orders & Execution
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. It is the time-in-force for orders built around price levels rather than around today.
The natural use is patience: a resting buy limit at a level you would love but do not expect this week. The failure mode is forgetting. A stale GTC sell can fire months later into a spike you no longer want to sell, and a GTC buy below the market can fill on an ex-dividend markdown or a gap on bad news, handing you shares precisely when the reason you wanted them is gone.
With a stock trading at $92, an investor enters a GTC buy limit at $85.00. Nineteen days later a sector-wide selloff tags $84.60 intraday and the order fills at $85.00 without the investor watching the tape at all. The same order left forgotten for months could just as easily have filled on company-specific bad news at $85 on its way to $70.
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Educational only — not financial advice. Definitions simplified for clarity; markets are messier than definitions.