A market order is a request to buy or sell a security at the currently available market price. It provides the most likely method of filling an order. Market orders fill nearly instantaneously.

As a trade-off, your fill price may slip depending on the available liquidity at each price level as well as any price moves that may occur while your order is being routed to its execution venue. There is also the risk with market orders that they may get filled at unexpected prices due to short-term price spikes.

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This order type allows you to input your order in a dollar amount, starting with a minimum of $1. You trade at the market price and your order is executed immediately at the available market price (if the market is open). If the market is closed, a pending order is created and your order will be executed once the market opens.
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​Market Orders In Shares
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​​This order type allows you to input your order in numbers of shares, starting at 0.000000001, but subject to a minimum of $1. You trade at the market price and your order is executed immediately at the available market price (if the market is open). If the market is closed, a pending order is created and your order will be executed once the market opens.
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​Limit Order
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A limit order is an order to buy or sell at a specified price or better. A buy limit order (a limit order to buy) is executed at the specified limit price or lower (i.e., better). Conversely, a sell limit order (a limit order to sell) is executed at the specified limit price or higher (better). Unlike a market order, you have to specify the limit price parameter when submitting your order.

While a limit order can prevent slippage, it may not be filled for a quite a bit of time, if at all. For a buy limit order, if the market price is within your specified limit price, you can expect the order to be filled. If the market price is equivalent to your limit price, your order may or may not be filled; if the order cannot immediately execute against resting liquidity, then it is deemed non-marketable and will only be filled once a marketable order interacts with it. You could miss a trading opportunity if price moves away from the limit price before your order can be filled.

​​Limit Orders placed on the Gotrade app are good-until-cancelled, which means they will remain queued either until they execute, or you cancel the queued order. It is good practice to monitor your queued orders regularly and cancel any that you no longer want.

A stop (market) order is an order to buy or sell a security when its price moves past a particular point, ensuring a higher probability of achieving a predetermined entry or exit price. Once the order is elected, the stop order becomes a market order. Alpaca converts buy stop orders into stop limit orders with a limit price that is 4% higher than a stop price < $50 (or 2.5% higher than a stop price >= $50). Sell stop orders are not converted into stop limit orders.

A stop-limit order is a conditional trade over a set time frame that combines the features of a stop order with those of a limit order and is used to mitigate risk. The stop-limit order will be executed at a specified limit price, or better, after a given stop price has been reached. Once the stop price is reached, the stop-limit order becomes a limit order to buy or sell at the limit price or better. In the case of a gap down in the market that causes the election of your order, but not the execution, you order will remain active as a limit order until it is executable or cancelled.

Trailing stop orders allow you to continuously and automatically keep updating the stop price threshold based on the stock price movement. You request a single order with a dollar offset value or percentage value as the trail and the actual stop price for this order changes as the stock price moves in your favorable way, or stay at the last level otherwise. This way, you don’t need to monitor the price movement and keep sending replace requests to update the stop price close to the latest market movement.

Trailing stop orders keep track of the highest (for sell, lowest for buy) prices (called high water mark, or hwm) since the order was submitted, and the user-specified trail parameters determine the actual stop price to trigger relative to high water mark. Once the stop price is triggered, the order turns into a market order, and it may fill above or below the stop trigger price.

A bracket order is a chain of three orders that can be used to manage your position entry and exit. It is a common use case of an OTOCO (One Triggers OCO {One Cancels Other}) order.

The first order is used to enter a new long position, and once it is completely filled, two conditional exit orders are activated. One of the two closing orders is called a take-profit order, which is a limit order, and the other is called a stop-loss order, which is a stop order. Importantly, only one of the two exit orders can be executed. Once one of the exit orders is filled, the other is canceled. Please note, however, that in extremely volatile and fast market conditions, both orders may fill before the cancellation occurs.

OCO (One-Cancels-Other) is another type of advanced order type. This is a set of two orders with the same side (buy/buy or sell/sell) and currently only exit order is supported. In other words, this is the second part of the bracket orders where the entry order is already filled, and you can submit the take-profit and stop-loss in one order submission.

With OCO orders, you can add take-profit and stop-loss after you open the position, without thinking about those two legs upfront.

OTO (One-Triggers-Other) is a variant of bracket order. It takes one of the take-profit or stop-loss order in addition to the entry order. For example, if you want to set only a stop-loss order attached to the position, without a take-profit, you may want to consider OTO orders.