Good-Till-Cancelled Order
A Good-Till-Cancelled (GTC) order is a standing order to buy or sell a security at a specified price that remains active until it is either executed or explicitly cancelled by the investor.
Good-Till-Cancelled orders gave investors the ability to set a target price and wait for the market to reach it without needing to reenter the order every day. In contrast to a day order — which expired at the close of the trading session if unfilled — a GTC order persisted across sessions, queued in the broker's system until the market reached the specified price trigger or the investor chose to cancel it.
In the Indian regulatory framework, true exchange-level GTC orders were not natively supported on NSE or BSE in the same way as in some international markets. Instead, Indian brokers implemented GTC functionality through their own back-end systems: the broker held the order parameters and resubmitted the order to the exchange each trading day until it was executed or cancelled. This meant that GTC functionality on Indian platforms was technically broker-managed rather than exchange-managed, which introduced a dependency on the broker's operational continuity and systems.
GTC orders were particularly popular among investors who had identified a specific price level at which they wished to accumulate a stock — for example, during a market correction — but did not want to watch the terminal daily. A long-term investor might place a GTC limit order to purchase shares in a blue-chip company at a 15–20 percent discount to the prevailing market price, willing to wait weeks or months for a dip to that level. If the correction occurred, the order would execute automatically.
The risk of GTC orders related to staleness: over time, a price target that seemed reasonable when the order was placed could become irrelevant due to changed business fundamentals, new information, or a sustained price trend in the opposite direction. An investor who forgot about a GTC order might find it executed during a sharp but brief dip triggered by temporary panic, which could be either a fortunate outcome or an uninformed one depending on whether the investor still held the same view.
SEBI's regulations did not specifically address the disclosure or risk management requirements around GTC orders in the retail context, leaving individual brokers to define their own GTC policies, maximum duration limits (many capped GTC orders at 30, 60, or 90 days), and customer notification mechanisms when orders approached expiry.