Contingent Order Guidelines

Hours

You can set up and activate contingent orders at any time (including outside of standard market hours), however, because contingent orders require updated Level I quote information to function, they will not initialize until the next trading session.

After Hours

Contingent Orders become inactive at the end of the standard session (4:00 p.m. ET), but they remain in the Order Status tab pending further action such as editing, activation, cancellation (deactivation) or removal.

Indices

Contingent orders based on indices should only be set up using the variables Trade Price, Change from Open, and Change from Close variables. Although you can create conditional orders that use indices using other variables such as Bid or Ask, these alerts will never fire because that data does not exist for indices.

Wide Spreads

Conditional orders on symbols with wide spreads may not fire if the spread is too wide.

Quick Triggers

Contingent orders automatically cancel if triggered within 10 seconds of being set.

StreetSmart Only

Brackets, Conditional Orders, and Alerts created in the StreetSmart platforms can only be viewed and managed from the StreetSmart family of applications and are not currently available from Schwab.com or other Schwab applications.

Position Quantities

When placing a contingent order where you are trading a securities in your account, if the tradable quantity of your position is less than the order quantity, the order will be sent for the lesser amount (as opposed to rejecting the order due to insufficient shares available to trade).

EXAMPLE

You have a contingent order to sell your 1000 shares of ABCD. At some point between when you established the conditional order and when it triggers, you sell 300 shares. When the conditions are met, the order will be adjusted to the new quantity and a Smart market order for the remaining 700 shares will be sent. The same would hold true if you were short 1000 shares of ABCD and you tried to buy 1500 shares using a conditional order.

After a Contingent Order Triggers

• Contingent orders established with conditions that have already been met or are imminent will not activate and you will be presented with an opportunity to make changes to your order.
• After a contingent is triggered and the order is sent, the conditions are deactivated. The same contingent order cannot trigger more than once without being reactivated first.

Inactive Conditional Orders

Contingent orders which have been inactive for 4 months will be automatically removed from the system.