Guide · Order types

What is a GTT order?

The short answer

A GTT, short for Good Till Triggered, is a standing instruction that waits, for up to about a year, until price reaches a trigger you set, and only then places the actual order. It exists because ordinary orders are day orders that expire each session, so a GTT lets you set a target or a protective level once and walk away. The mechanic most explanations skip: the trigger is held at the broker, not resting in the exchange order book, which is why a GTT fires only in market hours, can be jumped by a gap, and is a convenience rather than a guarantee.

Most guides define a GTT correctly and stop there. The definition is the easy part; the machinery underneath is where the surprises live. A GTT is not an order sitting at the exchange waiting to fill, it is a condition sitting at your broker waiting to create an order. That single fact decides when a GTT can act, why it can quietly miss, and why a protective GTT is a convenience rather than a promise. It is a genuine convenience that shifts a real risk onto you without ever announcing it. This guide covers the two shapes precisely, then the broker-side reality, the validity cap, and the corporate-action trap that separate knowing what a GTT is from knowing how it behaves. It assumes you already know the mechanics of a plain market and limit order; if not, the companion guide on the difference between a market and a limit order sets those out.

The problem a GTT solves

On NSE and BSE, an ordinary order is a day order: if it does not execute by the close, it lapses, and you must re-enter it the next morning. For an investor watching a level that may take weeks or months to arrive, a stock they will only buy on a dip, or a holding they will only sell into strength, that daily re-entry is tedious and easy to forget. Miss one morning and the level can come and go while no order is working, which is the single most common way a patient plan quietly fails: not because the analysis was wrong, but because nobody was at the screen the day it came true.

A GTT removes the re-entry. You define the level once, and the instruction stays alive for a long, broker-set window, commonly stated as up to 365 days. You are not asking the market to fill an order now; you are asking your broker to watch a price and place the order for you if and when that price is reached. This is why GTTs suit patient, level-based planning: the discipline of act only at this price is preserved without you having to be present the day it happens. The figure below sets the two worlds side by side, the day order that dies every evening against the single instruction that rests until it is touched.

The GTT trades presence for patience. A day order must be re-armed every session, so a level that arrives on a morning you forgot is simply missed. A GTT is placed once and rests across the whole wait, firing the instant the level is touched. The cost of that patience is the validity cap: the instruction is good for up to about a year, and if the trigger is never reached it lapses and must be recreated. The order automates the waiting; it does not remove the need to be right about the level.

The two types: single-leg and OCO

A GTT comes in two shapes, and the difference is simply how many triggers you arm at once. A single-leg GTT is one trigger placing one order: buy if price falls to a level you consider attractive, or sell if it rises to a target. An OCO GTT, one-cancels-the-other, arms two triggers on a holding at the same time, a target above and a stop-loss below, and the first one the market reaches fires its leg and cancels the other. Only one of the two can ever execute, which is the entire point of pairing them.

The OCO is a bracket for a holding you already own. A single-leg GTT is a patient entry or a patient exit. The OCO pairs a profit exit above and a protective exit below the same position, and links them so taking one retires the other. It is the manual way to bracket a delivery holding, which matters because the leveraged intraday products that used to do this were largely withdrawn, a change covered further down.

Read the two shapes as answers to two different questions. The single-leg answers when do I want in, or when do I want out, a single decision you would otherwise have to re-place each day. The OCO answers a richer question, how do I define both the good exit and the bad exit for something I hold, and then let the market pick which one it hands me. Neither shape changes the underlying mechanic that the rest of this guide turns on: both are triggers waiting at the broker, not orders resting at the exchange.

The two GTT structures, what each does, and its typical use. Illustrative levels.
Type	Triggers	What it does	Typical use
Single-leg	One	Places one order when the trigger is crossed, a buy below or a sell above the current price	A patient entry on a dip, or a patient exit at a target, without daily re-entry
OCO (two-leg)	Two, paired	Arms a target above and a stop below a holding; the first to trigger fires and cancels the other	Bracketing a delivery holding with both a profit exit and a protective exit at once

The mechanic most people miss: the trigger lives at the broker

This is the authority core of the topic, and the point almost every short explainer omits. A GTT trigger does not rest in the exchange order book. Until it fires, nothing is working at the exchange at all. The condition, watch this stock, and when the last traded price crosses this level, act, is stored and monitored by your broker. Only at the instant the trigger is crossed does the broker release an order into the exchange, and that released order is usually a plain limit order at a price you set in advance.

That shape has a consequence people rarely state plainly: a GTT depends on the broker being up and watching. The trigger is evaluated by the broker's systems against the live feed, so it inherits the broker's uptime and the liquidity available at the moment it fires. The order you imagine standing guard at the exchange is not there. What is there, until the trigger fires, is a note at the broker and nothing else. The figure below is the whole argument in one frame: the resting condition on the left, the gap that defeats it on the right.

The order is born only when the trigger fires, and a gap can already be past it. On the left, the GTT is a stored condition at the broker while the exchange book holds everyone else's orders but nothing of yours. On the right, the stock gaps from a ₹868 close to a ₹810 open, leaping over the ₹850 trigger and the ₹848 limit that sit in the band the price skipped. The trigger fires exactly as designed and the broker releases the limit, but price never trades back to ₹848, so the sell sits unfilled. The GTT did its one job; the fill was never in its gift.

Three consequences follow directly, and each one catches people out. First, a GTT can only be evaluated during market hours, because the trigger watches the live last traded price on the exchange; you can create or cancel a GTT overnight, but it cannot fire while the market is shut. Second, because the released order is a limit, triggered does not mean filled: if price gaps past your level and never trades back at your limit, the order can sit unfilled, and it is cancelled at the end of the day like any other unfilled order. Third, the GTT trigger fires only once, so a missed fill is not retried automatically; you would have to recreate the GTT yourself, and you will usually learn it missed only after the move is over.

Why a protective GTT is not a guaranteed stop

Put the broker-side mechanic together with a gap and you get the failure that matters most. Suppose you hold a stock and set a protective stop-loss GTT with a trigger at ₹850 and a sell limit at ₹848. Overnight the company reports poor results. The next morning the stock does not trade down through ₹850 tick by tick, it opens at ₹810. Your trigger is crossed, so the broker duly releases the sell limit at ₹848, but the market is already at ₹810 and never comes back to ₹848. The limit sits unfilled, and you are still holding the position, now well below the level you meant to exit at. The mechanics of that overnight jump are the subject of the guide on gap-up and gap-down opens, and they are exactly the conditions a resting stop is least able to handle.

The gap is only the sharpest of three ways a released limit can miss, and all three arrive precisely when protection matters most. A gap through your level, as above, opens below both the trigger and the limit and never trades back to your price. A stock locked at its lower circuit is frozen with sellers and no buyers, so even a triggered order cannot be matched until the band reopens. And a thin, illiquid counter may simply not offer your limit price at all, while a small trade elsewhere still ticks the trigger. In each case the trigger fires honestly and the fill never comes.

Where a GTT can miss. A GTT is held at the broker, so nothing protects you until the trigger fires, and the released limit order can then fail to fill in exactly the conditions you most wanted protection: a gap through your level on news, a stock frozen at its lower circuit with no buyers, or a thin counter where your price is simply not offered. A protective GTT places an exit attempt when your level is crossed. It does not guarantee that you exit, or at what price.

This is not a flaw unique to GTTs, it is the nature of any stop that releases a limit order, and where you place the level is a separate craft covered in how to place a stop-loss. But it is sharper for a GTT precisely because the whole appeal is set-and-forget: the investor who placed a protective GTT and stopped watching is the one most exposed to a gap, because they will learn the limit missed only after the damage. A GTT is a convenience for planning around price levels. It is not insurance, and the feeling of safety it gives is the most dangerous thing about it.

A worked example: a patient entry and a bracketed holding

Take the two uses in turn with plain rupee arithmetic. Suppose a stock trades at ₹1,000 and you would only buy it on a pullback to ₹900. You set a single-leg GTT with a trigger at ₹900 and a buy limit at ₹902 for 50 shares. The instruction waits, doing nothing to your capital. If weeks later the stock drifts down and trades at ₹900, the broker releases the buy limit; it fills up to ₹902, and you are in at a level you chose in advance rather than one you chased. All figures here are illustrative.

Now suppose you already own those 50 shares at ₹1,000 and want to manage the position without watching it daily. You set an OCO GTT: a sell target at ₹1,200 and a protective stop at ₹850. Whichever the market reaches first fires its leg and cancels the other. The table traces the three ways that resolves, and the third row is the one the set-and-forget investor must read carefully.

An OCO GTT on a 50-share holding bought at ₹1,000, with the three ways it can resolve. Illustrative figures.
Outcome	Leg that fires	Result on 50 shares	The other leg
Price reaches ₹1,200 first	Target sell	Books about +₹10,000 versus the ₹1,000 cost, if the limit fills	Stop at ₹850 is cancelled automatically
Price reaches ₹850 first	Protective sell	Caps the loss near −₹7,500, if the limit fills at your level	Target at ₹1,200 is cancelled automatically
Price gaps below ₹850	Protective sell released	Limit may miss; you can still be holding well below ₹850	Target cancelled; GTT fired once, not retried

Read the third row carefully, because it is the honest one. The OCO did exactly what it promised, it released the protective leg the instant ₹850 was crossed, but a limit order cannot chase a market that has already jumped past it. The two clean rows are the common case; the third is the tail the set-and-forget investor must price in. What the GTT gave you was placement without vigilance, not a guaranteed price, and the gap between those two is where the real risk of the whole convenience lives.

How long a GTT lives, and why brokers cap it

The validity window is not a detail; it is part of the design, and it points at the same broker-side truth as everything else. A GTT is commonly valid for up to about a year, often stated as 365 days from the day it is placed. Reach the window without the trigger ever being touched and the GTT simply lapses, with no order ever sent; you must recreate it if you still want the level watched. The cap exists because a resting broker-side condition is not free to keep alive forever. It has to be monitored against the live feed every session, it accumulates through every corporate action and price adjustment on the stock, and a trigger set at a price from a year ago is increasingly likely to be stale rather than intended.

There is a discipline lesson hidden in the cap. A level worth watching for a year is a level you should revisit well before the year is out, because the reason you chose it, an analysis, a valuation, a technical line, may no longer hold. A GTT that has quietly rested for eleven months is not a plan being followed so much as a plan being forgotten. The honest way to use the long window is as permission not to babysit an order daily, not as permission to stop thinking about the position entirely. The order will wait patiently; whether the level still deserves to be waited for is a question only you can keep asking.

The number varies, so treat it as a shape, not a promise. Around a year is the common design, but the exact maximum validity, and whether the count is calendar days or trading days, is a broker-specific setting and can change. As of 17 July 2026, confirm the current maximum, and the exact lapse behaviour, in your own broker's live documentation before you rely on it, rather than assuming a fixed 365 from any single source.

The corporate-action reset trap

Here is the risk that a year-long resting order quietly runs, and that almost no explainer mentions. A trigger is a fixed price. A corporate action moves the price the trigger refers to. When a stock does a bonus issue or a stock split, the exchange re-prices it on the ex-date: a 1:1 bonus roughly halves the quote and doubles your share count, and a split does the same by ratio. Your wealth does not change, but the number on the screen does, sharply, and it looks exactly like a crash while being nothing of the kind. The mechanics of that adjustment are set out in the guide on what a stock split is.

Now picture your resting GTT across that ex-date. You had a protective stop at ₹850 under a stock trading near ₹1,000. After a 1:1 bonus the quote is about ₹500, and your untouched ₹850 stop is suddenly above the market. Left alone, the trigger condition is satisfied by a drop that never really happened, so it would fire on a phantom fall. A sell target at ₹1,200 has the mirror problem: it is now stranded far above a ₹500 quote and will never be reached. A fixed trigger cannot follow a re-priced stock, which is why this is a genuine trap and not a rare edge case.

The drop is arithmetic, not a crash, and the trigger cannot tell the difference. A 1:1 bonus halves the quote on the ex-date while doubling your shares, so a holder of 100 shares at ₹1,000 holds 200 at ₹500 and is exactly as wealthy. But the ₹850 stop did not move, so the halved quote sits below it and the phantom drop would trip a stop that was never really breached, while a ₹1,300 target is stranded far above. This is why brokers cancel or re-price resting GTTs at a corporate action.

Because a fixed trigger and a re-priced stock cannot coexist, brokers step in at the ex-date: many cancel the resting GTT outright, some adjust the trigger to the new price, and the exact handling varies by broker. As of 17 July 2026, verify how your own broker treats GTTs across corporate actions rather than assuming. Either behaviour has a sting. If the broker cancels it, your protective or target level silently stops working and you may not notice until you next look, which is precisely the set-and-forget habit the order encourages. If the broker adjusts it, the adjusted level is the broker's arithmetic, not the level you actually decided, so it deserves a fresh look. The safe habit is simple: when a stock you hold a GTT on announces a split, bonus or similar action, treat your resting order as void and place it again deliberately once the stock is trading on its new basis.

GTT versus a resting limit and a bracket or cover order

Three order ideas get muddled because they all involve a price and an exit, yet they live in different places and answer different questions. Fix on three axes and they separate cleanly: where does the instruction live, is a fill guaranteed once triggered, and over what horizon does it operate. The intraday brackets in the last two rows are the specialist tools covered in the guides on the bracket order and the cover order; the point of the table is where a GTT sits against them.

GTT compared with a live resting limit order and the intraday bracket or cover order. Illustrative.
Order	Where it lives	Fill guaranteed?	Horizon	Legs
GTT (single-leg)	Trigger at the broker	No, released limit can miss	Up to about a year, then lapses	One trigger, one order
GTT (OCO)	Two triggers at the broker	No, released limit can miss	Up to about a year, then lapses	Target and stop, one cancels the other
Resting limit order	In the exchange order book	No, but it is live and working now	Day order, expires at the close	One order
Bracket order (BO)	At the exchange, intraday	No, a stop is a trigger, not a price	Intraday, auto square-off	Entry, target, stop, optional trail
Cover order (CO)	At the exchange, intraday	No, a stop is a trigger, not a price	Intraday, auto square-off	Entry and compulsory stop

The sharpest contrast is the first one. A resting limit order is at the exchange and live this second, but dies at the close; a GTT is not at the exchange at all, it is a condition at your broker that can wait for months and only then creates an order. There is a reason the OCO GTT now carries so much weight for retail, and it is regulatory. Through SEBI's peak-margin framework, introduced in July 2020 and phased to 100 percent upfront margin by September 2021, the intraday leverage that made bracket and cover orders attractive was removed, and many brokers discontinued them (as of 17 July 2026; verify the current position at sebi.gov.in). With the branded intraday brackets largely gone, the OCO GTT became the common way to bracket a delivery holding, but it is not a like-for-like swap: a bracket order was an intraday, exchange-side, leveraged product, while a GTT is a long-dated, broker-side, cash-segment instruction that carries every caveat in this guide.

When a GTT genuinely helps, and when it lulls you

The order is neither a gimmick nor a safety net; it is a specific convenience with a specific failure mode, and almost every mistake with it comes from reading a genuine use as a guarantee. The same instruction can be exactly the right tool or a quiet trap depending only on what you believe it is doing for you. The table sets the sound reading of each use against the dangerous one, because the danger is never in the order, it is in the assumption the user brings to it.

The same order, read two ways: as a convenience it earns its place; as a guarantee it misleads. Illustrative.
The job	Used as a convenience, this is sound	Trusted as a guarantee, this is the trap
A patient entry	Waits for a dip you would otherwise have to re-place daily	Assumed to fill at your level whenever the dip comes
Taking profit	Sells at a pre-committed target without you watching	Believed to fill even if the stock gaps far above the level
Protecting a holding	Places an exit attempt under a delivery position for ordinary moves	Trusted to save you through a gap, a circuit or a crash
Bracketing after peak margin	Attaches a target and a stop once intraday brackets were withdrawn	Treated as a like-for-like, guaranteed exchange-side exit
Set and forget	Rests for months so you need not be at the screen	Assumed to survive corporate actions and broker downtime untouched

The left column is a fair description of a useful tool for a part-time or long-horizon investor: it removes drudgery and enforces a pre-committed level. The right column is the same tool believed to be something it is not, and every entry in it is a way the convenience quietly hands you a risk you did not price. The whole difference between the two columns is whether you remember that a GTT is a broker-side trigger, not an exchange-side guarantee.

Where a GTT belongs: it automates the placing, not the filling

Strip the topic to its core and one line holds it: a GTT automates the placing of an order, not the filling of it. Everything up to the moment the trigger fires is genuinely handled for you, the watching, the timing, the release of the order at your chosen price, and, in an OCO, the cancelling of the other leg. Everything after that moment belongs to the order book, exactly as it would for any order you placed by hand: finding a counterparty, filling at all, surviving a gap or a locked circuit. The figure below draws the line where the automation ends and the market begins.

The automation ends the instant the trigger fires. A GTT reliably watches the price, fires at your level, places the order at your price and cancels the paired OCO leg. What it cannot do is find a counterparty, guarantee the fill, protect across a gap or a locked circuit, or survive a corporate action unchanged. Placement without vigilance is real and useful; a guaranteed exit is not on offer, and reading one as the other is the whole mistake.

So the honest place for a GTT is narrow and real: it is an execution convenience for patient, level-based planning in the cash segment, and for the part-time investor who cannot sit at the screen it does a job nothing else does as simply. What it cannot do is decide the level or guarantee the exit. The trigger you set is only as good as the analysis behind it, the level where your idea is genuinely confirmed or genuinely wrong, and the size behind it comes from a risk budget, not from convenience. Choosing that entry, that invalidation level and that size is the upstream work, and it is exactly what the method we teach is built around. A GTT then executes the plan patiently. Read plainly: it places the order you already decided to place; it does not tell you whether the order is worth placing, and it does not promise the market will honour your price when the trigger fires.