Wouldn’t it be great if we could always place a conditional order? “I’ll take the spaghetti if it comes with sausage imported from Italy.” Or, “I’ll buy these shoes if they have an orthotic built in.”
Savvy traders in the stock market like to place conditional orders with specific criteria, such as a stop order (an order to buy or sell a stock once it reaches a specified price), a limit order (an order to buy or sell a stock at a specific price or better), or a stop limit order (like...a stock currently trades at $40 and you’d like to sell if it goes below $39, but only if it can be sold for $38 or more). In other words, in a conditional order, traders state certain prices that a stock has to reach before they'll buy or sell, not just the first available price. They might also state that the stock has to reach a certain volume, or be available at a price for a certain length of time, or hit a percent change.
Another type of conditional order is called one-cancels-other. Here the trader can place several conditional orders, and when one hits the specified criteria, the order executes and automatically cancels all the other orders. An order-sends-order is kind of the opposite; when one order is executed, it triggers more orders to be placed.
Let’s say Tracy Trader has been following a certain stock and believes it's about to go down in price. She places a conditional order to buy a put option (predicting the price will go down) once the stock hits $20. Her conditional order would be to buy the put option when the underlying stock goes down to $20.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is an All or None Order?71 Views
finance a la shmoop what is an all-or-none order oh you'd think that
spoiled brats only live on playgrounds of participation trophy cities hmm but [Boys holding participation trophies]
that is oh so sadly not true they roam the wild hallways of Wall Street
investment firms in droves and all-or-none order means that a buyer or
seller of stock either wants all of their shares bought or sold or none of
them and yes this applies to bonds preferred stocks and other random [Man discussing stocks and bonds]
hybrids as well.....A buyer has a portfolio of 500 million dollars in small cap
growth stocks generally speaking she's told her clients that she won't take
less than a 2% position in anything because she wants to be able to focus on
a core group of stocks and really be on top of any big movements hoping to sell [Stocks in a sack land on a table]
the shares before well, any huge problems holding so in this case she's
found a company she loves an appropriately named coal company for [Woman looking through binoculars in her car]
spoiled investors called mine mine mine the only problem is that the stock is
thinly traded that is not a ton of shares trade every day and she needs to
own either ten million dollars worth of stock which would be a two percent
position or she doesn't want to own any the stock at the moment is trading at
ten dollars and seven cents a share and she wants it at ten bucks or better...
well at ten dollars and one penny she has no interest whatsoever in that stock [Stock graph for mine mine mine company]
at 10.00 she's a buyer so that is her limit order but on this all-or-none
order she waits and waits and waits knowing that sometimes all-or-none [Woman looking at laptop waiting for the stocks]
orders simply never get filled other times they get filled scarily too fast
like the seller knew something the buyer did not but along comes a bad market day
the White House says something stupid what are the odds? and the market tanks for
an hour and blam she is the proud new owner of a million shares of mine mine
mine good for her those shares are now all hers hers hers [Pigeon poops on mans head]
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