Working order

The state an order occupies between being accepted and being resolved. It is also called a live, resting or pending order, and it covers the limit and stop orders in both directions, whether they open a position or close one, along with a stop loss or take profit attached to a position that is already open. What makes an order working is that nothing further is required for it to execute: its own condition triggers it. A market order never works in this sense, because it is resolved at the moment it is sent, either by a fill or by a rejection.

How long it stays live is set by its time in force, from an order that expires at the end of the trading day to one that remains until it is cancelled, and it can usually be amended or cancelled at any point while it works. Being live is not a promise of a fill, and the two order families fail differently: a limit executes only at its stated price or better, so a market that touches the level and turns away can leave it untouched, while a stop becomes a market order once triggered and is then filled at the next available price, which in fast conditions can be some distance from the level named. Margin is another common surprise. It is required by the position the order would open rather than by the order sitting there, so an instruction that has waited safely for a week can trigger and then be rejected because the free margin available at that moment does not cover the position.

Working orders live on the broker's server, not in the application, so closing the platform or the laptop leaves them in force, and an order left after the position it was written for has already been closed keeps working unless it was linked to that position or paired under a one cancels the other instruction. An order left until cancelled can also trigger weeks later, into a market whose conditions bear no resemblance to the ones the level was chosen in. Whether orders are left working across a scheduled release is a genuine and open disagreement among practitioners: the same instruction that participates automatically without anybody watching also participates at whatever price the release produces, and the two properties cannot be separated.