Good Till Expiry vs Good for Day: What Traders Need to Know

The four common order-duration types

Most brokers expose four pending-order durations. Day (GFD — Good For Day): expires at session close. GTC (Good Till Cancelled): persists until you cancel it. GTD (Good Till Date): expires at a specific timestamp you set. IOC (Immediate-Or-Cancel): fill immediately or cancel — used for limit-on-close logic, not for pending orders.

The practical danger is mixing them up. A GFD limit order on a futures position expires at 16:00 CT; if you intended it to be GTC you wake up with no pending exit. A GTD set with the wrong timezone expires hours earlier than expected. A GTC order on a contract that rolls (e.g. ES → ESM26) becomes meaningless after roll because the contract specifier changes.

How MT4 and MT5 handle order duration

MT4 has a simpler model: pending orders are persistent until cancelled, with an optional Expiration field that effectively makes them GTD. There is no broker-side Day order concept in standard MT4.

MT5 supports four order durations natively: Good Till Cancel, Today, Specified, and Specified Day. The MetaTrader 5 docs list the exact semantics. Brokers may extend this with custom durations.

For expert advisors the difference matters when your EA places a pending stop on Friday evening. Without an explicit GTC flag the order may not survive the weekly close depending on broker policy.

NinjaTrader and futures-specific behaviour

NinjaTrader exposes Day and GTC as the primary durations for futures pending orders. The catch: many futures brokers (Rithmic, CQG, Continuum) auto-cancel pending orders at session close even when you submit them as GTC if their server-side policy is set that way. Always confirm with your broker whether GTC means "until I cancel it" or "until the next session boundary".

Why this matters for VPS hosting

A VPS does not change order-duration semantics — the broker decides what GTC means, not your platform. But a VPS prevents an entire class of related bug: pending orders that get cancelled because your home connection dropped during a reconnect. On a VPS the platform stays connected continuously, so the broker never sees an unexpected disconnect-driven cancellation.