Knowledge Base

An Immediate or Cancel (IOC) order or ‘Accept order’ allows a you to buy or sell a contract as soon as the order is entered into the market, failing the execution of which the order will be cancelled from the market. Partial matching of the order is possible and the unmatched portion of the order is cancelled immediately.
This means that once an order is submitted into the system, the order is executed either entirely or partly depending on the matched quantity. The order for remaining quantity which was not matched is cancelled. There is no ‘Pending Order’ if you place order using retention validity as IOC.
An IOC order can be both, a Market order or a Limit order. If it is a market order, then the order will be executed immediately if the number of shares demanded in the order are available. If not the order will be cancelled. If it is a limit order, then the order will be executed immediately if the number of shares demanded in the order are available at the required price. If not the order will be cancelled. IOC order may match completely or partially, or it may not match at all. In any case, the order will not stay ‘pending’ in the system.
The Immediate or Cancel order is especially used by jobbers, scalpers or screen-traders. They will be using thousands of orders in a day. They want their orders to be executed immediately or cancelled if not executed immediately. Their decision to buy or sell a stock at a price keeps changing very quickly with the passage of time. What may be a buying price now, may be a selling price a little later. Scalpers will not have time to manually cancel the order, in case they do not want them to be placed.
Major benefits of the IOC Order

• Quick way to fill an order for buying or selling with definitive known outcome
• Often used for transactions with large quantities
• Used for filling orders incrementally

To place IOC order in the SAMCO Trader EXE Platform, Select IOC in the Validity dropdown menu as seen in the image below,

To place IOC order in the SAMCO Web Xpress HTML – 5 Platform, Select IOC in the retention drop down menu as seen in the image below,

The other popular order validity types is the EOD or End of Day validity order.

Was this article helpful?

Share