Order Types

Now that you can see the queue, order types stop being broker-app menu items and become what they really are: precise instructions to the matchmaker. Every one of them settles the same trade-off differently — certainty of execution vs. certainty of price.

Market order — "match me NOW at whatever the queue offers." Guaranteed fill, unguaranteed price. In a thick queue, fine. In a thin queue, your own order eats through levels and you get filled progressively worse — that worsening is slippage (the gap between the price you saw and the price you got; Chapter 10 dives deeper). Market orders pay for speed with price.

Limit order — "match me at ₹X or better, else I wait in the queue." Guaranteed price, unguaranteed fill. You become one of the resting orders in Chapter 2's book. The risk flips: price may run away without ever touching your level, and you watch the move from the platform. Limit orders pay for price with the risk of missing.

Stop-loss order (SL) — "if price reaches trigger ₹X, then place my order." The conditional instruction — dormant until touched. Two flavors, and the difference matters: SL-M (stop-loss market) fires a market order at trigger — guaranteed exit, slippage possible; SL-Limit fires a limit order — price protected, but in a fast crash the market can blow through your limit and leave you un-exited, still holding, in a falling market. For genuine protective stops, most traders accept SL-M's slippage over SL-Limit's abandonment risk — a very deliberate choice you should make knowingly, not by default.

Three time-instruction decoders you'll meet on every order screen: IOC (Immediate or Cancel — fill whatever's instantly available, kill the rest), GTT (Good Till Triggered — a broker-side standing instruction that survives days/weeks, useful for long-term stops), and the humble Day order (dies unfilled at close).

One structural truth to carry into Module 3: your resting stop-loss orders are visible demand/supply sitting in the machine. A cluster of thousands of traders' stops just below an obvious swing low is, mechanically, a pool of guaranteed future market orders parked at one spot. Chapter 14 (liquidity pools and stop hunts) is built entirely on this fact — remember it.