Good Until Canceled (GTC)

Good Until Canceled, usually shortened to GTC, is an instruction you attach to an order that tells your broker how long the order should stay active. It means the order keeps working in the background — waiting to be filled — until either the market reaches your price and it executes, or you manually cancel it yourself.

This matters because most orders have a default lifespan. If you place an order without specifying otherwise, many trading platforms treat it as a "day order," meaning it automatically expires at the end of that trading session if it hasn't been filled. A GTC order overrides that default: instead of vanishing at the closing bell, it carries over to the next trading day, and the next, and so on, until it either fills or you cancel it.

The nuance that catches beginners off guard is that "canceled" doesn't only mean by your own hand. Brokers typically impose their own outer time limit on GTC orders — the order isn't literally good forever. After some number of days or weeks, the broker's system will automatically expire it even though you never touched it. The exact limit varies by broker and by order type, so a GTC order you set weeks ago might have quietly disappeared without you noticing.

GTC is a duration instruction, not an order type on its own — you pair it with something like a limit order or a stop order. For example, you might place a "buy limit, GTC" order, which means the buy-at-a-specific-price instruction stays live across multiple sessions rather than resetting each day.