Conditional Order Guidelines

Hours

You can set up and activate conditional orders at any time (including outside of standard market hours) and they will display in the Order Status tab.

However, because conditional orders require updated Level I quote information to function, they will not initialize until the next trading session.

After Hours

Conditional 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, deactivation or removal.

Indices

Conditional 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

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

CollapsedEXAMPLE

P&L Alerts

If you have an active conditional order based on either the Share or Trade P&L of a position and you increase or reduce the position quantity, the software will ask you to decide what to do with the conditional order. You can tell it to:

After a Conditional Order Triggers