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market order

market order

1 3.6
A request to buy or sell shares immediately at the current price through a broker
  • noun
  • /ˈmɑrkɪt ˈɔrdər/
  • Specialized
translation icon : orden de mercado
  • Contemporary policy prescriptions tend to recommend Smith's concept of market order for all private goods and Hobbes's conception of the sovereign state for all collective goods.
  • a market order for stocks

Like you cannot set market orders for buy and sell.

Examples

  • We must accept the outcome of the market order; moreover, we risk upsetting a system that, on the whole, provides the best chance of satisfying people's expectations overall.

    Academic text (1999)
  • As important, a market order with its appeal to the free, self-interested activities of economic man replaced an economic and social order of arbitrary command that too often oppressed and offered little opportunity to the poor—that is, to the vast majority of human beings throughout history.

    Academic text (1992)
  • Like you cannot set market orders for buy and sell.

  • In closing a position, use market orders.

    Blog text (6)
  • So a market order is where it'll just buy the stock at market.

  • HFT has made stop-loss and market orders basically useless except in stocks with the highest volumes.

    Blog text (4)
  • The average investor only places one or two trades in a given month, and every brokerage account available has an average execution time of less than 2 seconds for market orders.

    Blog text (23)
  • A market order allows an investor to buy stocks immediately at the current price.

  • When you place a market order, you agree to purchase the stock at whatever price it is selling for right now.

  • He executed a market order to sell his shares as soon as the market opened.

Synonyms

mkt
vsmarket order
  • Jargon
8.9

An order to buy or sell at the current market price

instructs a broker to buy or sell immediately at the current price

How Immediate

market order
  • Specialized
1 3.6
stop order
  • Specialized
1 5.8
stop-limit order
  • Specialized
8.4

Surface Forms

market order singular
market orders plural

Morphology

market + order

The meaning is compositionally built from 'market' + 'order' so a B1 learner would likely infer it is an order placed in a market, but the crucial technical detail — that it is executed immediately at the current market price (usually via a broker) — is a specialised financial sense not fully predictable from everyday meanings of the constituents. Because the basic idea is deducible but the specific execution/pricing implication requires domain knowledge, this is best classed as semi-transparent.

Etymology

Market order comes from busy marketplaces where a buyer or seller would give an order to trade at the current market price and have it done at once. So, a market order today means telling a broker to buy or sell 'immediately' at whatever the price is now.