Stocks: do Good Till Cancelled orders get executed during after hours?
"You'd have to check the rules for your broker to make sure that the term is being used in its usual sense, but the typical answer to your question is ""no.""  A GTC will execute during market hours.  You would need to explicitly specify extended hours if you want to execute outside of market hours (which your broker may or may not support)." When I place an order with Scottrade I also have to specify if I am wanting to trade outside of normal hours. You typically need to specify that you want the GTC order to be working during the Extended hours session. I trade on TD Ameritrade's Thinkorswim platform, and you can select DAY, GTC, EXT or GTC_EXT. So in your case, you would select GTC_EXT.
That is very true.  I should have used the qualifier that they basically only do domestic travel.  I have never tried to red-eye with them, but I guess they don't do it much, if at all.  However, if you have freedom, they are awesome due to their policies on:  * changing tickets (no fees, just fair difference and you keep the credit until you use it even when you buy the cheap fair),  * they don't fuck around with 24 hour cancellation policy (if you decide to cancel, no question/pressure, they just refund the money),   * [their rewards program is arguably the best if not one of the best](http://abcnews.go.com/Business/best-worst-frequent-flier-programs/story?id=13693563#.UIlyFK28FQI),  * they don't charge to check bags,   * **their boarding process get people on the plane in 15 mins instead of 30 or 45 mins** (my favorite part of SW after recently flying AA after like 10 consequitve SW flight),  * [they are the most on-time airline in the US](http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/18/americas-on-time-lifestyle-travel-tech-airlines-jet-blue-southwest.html),   * and they give away drink tickets like candy on halloween If you really want to break into the industry you need to position yourself and skils in a way that indicates you can make money.  Start reading books on behavioral trading, quantitative trading, hone in your programming languages and most importantly learn how ECNs match trades.    Learning the background of ECNs is critical, its learning the internal workings how a electronic trading platform and how they match trades, what order the trades are submitted and matched by priority, what level of quotes you can buy or sell on...I mean the list goes on.    During my undergrad at XX, I completed a graduate level independent study on ECNs.  Taught me (myself) tons of valuable information, right when high freq trading was becoming big money.  My professor was awesome and totally pushed me to write more and learn more.  A company I followed at the time was a new entrant, called BATS, (better alternative trading systems) based in KC, they have a subsidiary known as TRADEBOT, which is their high freq trading platform which trades in house.  (I cant actually comment how they are connected, bc that was not in the scope of my studies)  However, I do not agree with high freq trading firms, and its only a matter of time before they become regulated due to Flash Crashes, models gone bad, limit order issues, etc.  BUT, there is tons of money in it if you know what you are doing.    For example, BATS is an exchange, which means they know ALL the orders for the liquidity they provide for orders, they see the price depth and liquidity of anything that trades on their exchange.  TRADEBOT can look at this data, and see who wants to trade what, then they execute on their knowledge of the market and make profitable moves.    More or less, think of a dealer at a casino, and you are a player at a black jack table.  The exchange is providing the transparency of the deck and you are allowed to place bets off that knowledge.  See how its fishy?  There is still lots of money in it, and it wont be regulated till it blows up and someone losses a shit load of money.  So go for it if its something that drives you.  Cheers,  Sol. "Working for a lot of startups, I have seen this cycle. Really it has little to do with making the IPO look good because of number of employees, and is more about making the IPO look good because of planning for the future. Many times an IPO is released, it will be valued at $1.00 (made up) and the market will soar and spike. Now stock shares are valued at $3.00. Great. Till after the dust settles a bit, and stocks are valued at $0.85.  This is ""normal"" and good.  It would be better if the stocks ended a little higher than their initial value, but... such is life.  Now the initial value of the stock is made up of basically the value of the company's assets, and employees are part of those assets and its earning power. They are also a liability, but that has less impact on initial value than assets. Sales right after IPO are based on how well a company will do. Part of that is growth. So it looks nicer to say: ""We have 500 employees and have been growing by 20% per month."" than to say ""We have 100 employees"". In other words, before IPO, employees may be hired to make the company look like it is growing. They may be hired because the budget is projected based on expected growth and expected valuation.  After IPO, you get a concrete number. You have your budget. It may be more than you thought, or it may be less. In our example, the real budget (from capital), is only 28% of the entire projected budget, and 85% of the initial value. It's time to make some budget cuts.  Also, normally, there is a period of adjustment, company wide, as a company goes from VC funding, ""here, have as much money as you want"", to ""real world"" funding, with stricter limits and less wiggle room." "&gt;They compensate me fairly for doing work that I mostly enjoy.  I cant relate to your sentiment.  I work for an intercontinental grocery company, as a Janitor and Stocker for one of their local stores in the US.  I work swing shift for minimum wage as a Part Time employee.  No benefits.  Meanwhile, I sometimes work 15 hour shifts (anything over 12 is illegal for part timers, iirc).  I have worked every hour of the 24 hour clock inside the span of three days, and still not seen a day off for another week, while still not earning overtime for that week.  I've gotten 8 hours some weeks, and 39.8 hours other weeks, without any predictability.    I cannot even fully trust the work schedule they publish on Thursday for the following week beginning that coming Sunday.  With as little as three days notice with the posted schedule, I am on call to work, or have my shift cancelled, even after I am clocked in for that shift.  In the end, I am on call 24/7.  And I'm even expected to actively ""represent the company"" while off the clock, as free advertising.  No, not simply the ""don't do anything that would reflect poorly on your employer,"" but to actively (without any structured guidance, because that would turn it into labor, and necessitate pay) talk with neighbors and strangers about our low low prices.  If we don't spend our own free time to study the ads and specials, we recieve a public shaming among our peers.    There is not a single thing that I enjoy about my job.  Some of the other people working there aren't half bad.  But the best ones usually walk out or get fired for wanting little things like ""respect"".  I actually went to college.  I have job skills.  I almost didn't get hired because of this - but you know, I convinced them I was desperate to have *something* getting me by.  A few former college classmates who also work/ed there vouched for me on that.  I've charted how the quantity of most products going off of special that our computers order actually assumes the same number of sales as when it was *on special!*  I was in the process of deriving a better algorithm for this... and I enjoy *that* work.  But after I pointed this problem out to my manager, I was laughed at.  We literally throw away entire dumpsters full of product every month because it passes the expiration date, and management groans and complains about this. Yet my observation of how this happens was laughed at and shrugged off.  And just the icing on this cake: I still haven't gotten that second work shirt that I was promised after 90 days.  I've been there for 8 months.  Those long hours on back to back to back days don't always give me the opportunity to do laundry.  Then they complain when I reek at work, sweating as I rush the 20+ pound boxes of cat litter onto the shelves.    Fuck 'em.  Fuck 'em hard, fuck 'em long, and fuck 'em with something hard, sandpapery, and with splinters.  Gimme a few more months to demonstrate that I can hold a job, and I'm going to get a job at...   Fuck, everywhere else around here is just like this, and I don't know the people or have a portfolio of works in fields where I could actually use my Math degree." "My broker offers the following types of sell orders: I have a strategy to sell-half of my position once the accrued value has doubled.  I take into account market price, dividends, and taxes (Both LTgain and taxes on dividends).  Once the market price exceeds the magic trigger price by 10%, I enter a ""trailing stop %"" order at 10%.  Ideally what happens is that the stock keeps going up, and the trailing stop % keeps following it, and that goes on long enough that accrued dividends end up paying for the stock.  What happens in reality is that the stock goes up some, goes down some, then the order gets cancelled because the company announces dividends or something dumb like that. THEN I get into trouble trying to figure out how to re-enter the order, maintaining the unrealized gain in the history of the trailing stop order.  I screwed up and entered the wrong type of order once and sold stock I didn't want to. Lets look at an example. a number of years ago, I bought some JNJ -- a hundred shares at 62.18.  - Accumulated dividends are 2127.75  - My spreadsheet tells me the ""double price"" is 104.54, and double + 10% is 116.16.  - So a while ago, JNJ exceeded 118.23, and I entered a Trailing Stop 10% order to sell 50 shares of JNJ.  The activation price was 106.41.  - since then, the price has gone up and down...  it reached a high of 126.07, setting the activation price at 113.45.  - Then, JNJ announced a dividend, and my broker cancelled the trailing stop order.  I've re-entered a ""Stop market"" order at 113.45.  I've also entered an alert for $126.07 -- if the alert gets triggered, I'll cancel the Market Stop and enter a new trailing stop." Yes, from June 1968 until December 1968, they closed the NYSE every Wednesday so they could catch up on paperwork representing billions of dollars in unprocessed transactions.  Even after the NYSE re-opened on Wednesdays in January 1969, they still had to close it early at 2pm for seven more months. Forbes has a description of this: Not to be forgotten, though, is the Paperwork Crunch. In a day of email and the Cloud and trading completed in microseconds, the idea that Wall Street needed Wednesdays off in the late 1960′s to catch up on back-office tasks seems especially quaint. Yet, in 1968, the NYSE found itself sitting on more than $4 billion in unprocessed transactions. Trading had risen to 21 million shares daily; by contrast, even in the heavy volume days in 1929, trading never went above 16 million shares. Papers stacked on desks. A (now old) joke formed: If a fan blew the wrong way in a Wall Street office, visitors below could expect a ticker-tape parade. “Everybody agreed that the securities-processing system had virtually broken down, and the only major point of dispute was who was more responsible for the mess: the back offices of the brokerage firms of the stock-transfer agents,” Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Ray Garrett, Jr. said in 1974. Some 100 broker-dealers failed, crumbling under the pressure of fulfilling those back-orders. The fix: an organization akin to the FDIC, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Wall Street would stick to the shortened weeks from June to December; in January, Wednesday trading resumed, though it ended early at 2 for another seven months. Because the distribution date was APR 21, 2011, THAT should be the correct date for ascertainng the stock prices of the GM stock and warrants.  The subsequent distributions after April should also be allocated in accordance with their distribution dates, with tax basis being reduced from the original APR 21st date's allocations, and reallocated to those subsequent distributions, taking into account any interim sales you might have made. You can do FOK on both market and limit orders. Normal market orders will partial fill if you want more shares than are being offered, or if someone pulled their order before you get there and now there are fewer shares than you placed a trade for. With a FOK limit order not at the BBO you are shooting in the dark for a quick match, most of the time it does not fill.  This is a commonly used order type for UHFT arbitrage.  Some exchanges will not attempt to cross it for a match if its price is not at, or better than the market price. When the FOK limit order is at the BBO it is essentially a FOK market order.   FYI: Sometimes you have a minimum quantity to fill option, so you can let the order sit on the book until it fills or you cancel.