Pending orders that die at rollover

[Fairman]

Pending orders that die at rollover

An order marked "good till cancelled" should sit until it fills or is removed. Many brokers cancel pending orders at the weekly close anyway. Others cancel them at the daily rollover, or after a set number of days.

The behavior is documented in a corner of the terms. The platform's order ticket might say GTC, and the system may follow it only partially.

For scalpers, the effect is mostly a source of mild confusion: orders placed on Friday are gone Monday. But on some brokers, daily cancellation at 5pm New York wipes out resting orders every day, which breaks any plan that leaves limits working across sessions.

The other half of the problem is expiry time. A "today" order expires at the end of the server day, which is not the end of the local day, and not necessarily the end of the trading day in New York. An order set to expire at 23:59 server time may disappear at 4:59pm New York, hours before the user expects.

Testing is simple. Place a far-from-market order with GTC, check it the next morning, and again after the weekend.

Written anywhere, or only learned the hard way: what happens to GTC orders on the broker used here?

[Amanhasnoname]

I learned about this the irritating way with a set of buy limits on AUDUSD that I placed on a Friday afternoon for a level I expected to be tested early in the week. Monday morning price traded straight through the level and bounced exactly as planned, and my orders were nowhere to be seen. They had been cancelled at the weekly close, and the only mention of it was a single line deep in the account terms.

My current broker keeps GTC orders across the weekend, but a previous one removed every pending order at the daily rollover, which made any plan with resting orders across sessions pointless. I only found out because I tested it the way you describe, with an order far away from the market.

These days I also write down the server time zone in my trading plan, along with the hour that matches in my own time. A day order that expires at server midnight disappeared at seven in the evening my time, and I had been assuming it would sit there until I went to bed.