The order ticket is the firm's audit trail: it lets supervisors and regulators rebuild who ordered what, when and at whose discretion, which is how unauthorized or misallocated trades get caught. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 17a-3 and related marking rules require each order ticket to show:
- The account number.
- Buy or sell and, for sales, long (the customer owns the shares) or short (borrowed shares).
- The security and the quantity.
- The order type (market, limit or stop), the price and the time in force, such as day or good-till-canceled (GTC).
- The times of receipt, entry and execution, and the execution price.
- Whether it was discretionary.
- The representative responsible for the account.
Option orders also carry the Cboe Rule 5.7 details: symbol, expiration, strike, call or put, and number of contracts. Firms also mark whether an order was solicited and whether an option order opens or closes a position. Those two marks come from firm practice, not rule text.
Common mistakes
- Putting the ex-date one business day before the record date, a habit from T+2. Under T+1 it is the record date, or the day after payable for distributions of 25% or more.
- Counting a buy-in from trade date. Count from the delivery due date (see Example 1).
- Giving an off-exchange stock trade 15 minutes to report. Equity reports get 10 seconds; 15 minutes is the bond clock.
Bottom line
- Order tickets show account, buy or sell (long or short for sales), security, quantity, order type, price, time in force, entry and execution times, discretionary status and the responsible representative; firms also mark solicited orders and option opening or closing.
- Brokers act as agent and dealers as principal.
- The NYSE DMM keeps a fair and orderly market and runs openings and closings.
- Firm quotes bind up to displayed size, while subject, BW and OW quotes do not.
Exam shortcut
Sort deadline questions by product. Stock trades printed off-exchange get 10 seconds, and corporate, agency or municipal bond trades get 15 minutes. On settlement questions, write the days out and count buy-ins from the due date. On dividend questions, ask "under 25%?" If yes, the last regular-way day to buy is the business day before the record date.
The full lesson (about 4,116 words, 27 min read) adds 2 worked examples, all 5 common mistakes, a self-check, free in the app.
Learning objectives
- D33
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