অর্ডার কত রকম The kinds of order

Buying a share is not telling your broker that you would like some of a company. It is a specific instruction, and inside that instruction sit at least four decisions: which share, how many, at what price, and how long the instruction stays alive. Beginners get the third one wrong most often, and that mistake can be counted in money.

The lesson on supply and demand showed you the order book. Here we look at how your own order sits in that book, and which kind of order is right when.

What the order ticket looks like

The order screen looks much the same in every broker's app or web terminal. The labels move around; the boxes do not.

One thing is worth noticing here: the price box cannot really be left empty, at least not in your head. Leaving it blank, or choosing market, says that you will accept whatever price is going, and that is a decision rather than the absence of one.

Market order: now, at whatever it costs

A market order says: buy at whatever price is available in the market this instant. In a heavily traded share this is close to harmless, because the gap between the best buy and the best sell price is narrow.

In a thinly traded share it is a trap. Suppose the best seller is at 50 taka but only has 200 shares. The next seller is at 52, and the one after that at 55. If you send a market order for 1,000 shares it eats through all three, and your average price is not 50 but 53 or 54. That difference is called slippage: the gap between the price you saw when you pressed the button and the price you actually paid.

Limit order: my price, or nothing

With a limit order you name a maximum price. A limit order to buy 1,000 at 50 means: take it at 50 or less, wait if it is above 50. Selling is the mirror image, and you name a minimum.

The cost of a limit order is uncertainty. If the price never reaches your limit you get nothing, and the share can go up without you. A common beginner's habit is to leave a limit far below the market, wait six months, then buy in frustration at twice the price with a market order. Wrong twice.

How long an order lives

Every order has a life. The two common ones here are the day order, which is cancelled automatically when the market closes, and good till cancelled, which stays alive until you cancel it, usually up to some maximum number of days.

Good till cancelled is convenient and dangerous at once. Convenient because you do not have to re-enter it every day. Dangerous because you can forget it. A buy order placed three weeks ago on a company that had bad news last week will go on working for you even though you no longer want to buy it.

Stop orders, and their limits

A stop order is a conditional instruction: if the price falls to a given level, sell. The purpose is to keep a loss inside a boundary. Where a broker offers it, it is genuinely useful, especially for someone who cannot look at their account every day.

Three limits are worth remembering. First, not every broker in Bangladesh offers it, so ask yours. Second, once the stop is touched it usually becomes a market order, so in a fast-falling market you can be sold far below your stop price. Third, if a circuit breaker halts trading, your stop simply sits there, unable to do anything.

What to do as a beginner

One simple rule that carries you safely through a first year: always use a limit order, and set the limit very close to the market price. That protects you from slippage while leaving almost no risk of not filling. In a heavily traded share the difference is small; in a thinly traded one this habit is your single biggest protection.

One last thing, which no order ticket has a box for. Before you send anything, ask yourself why today. If the answer is that today is when you had time, that is fine, because you have a monthly rule. If the answer is that the price is rising and you will miss it if you wait, then the problem is not the order type, it is the decision.