Good This Month - GTM

Infomercials are the best. Not only do the products advertised make us realize how many things exist that we didn’t know we needed (portable sauna, anyone?), but there’s always some irresistible special offer involved: if we use the offer code “POTATO,” we’ll get a free throw blanket! If we call or go online within the next 24 hours, they’ll triple our order for free and send three of our loved ones a fruit basket! All we have to pay is a separate processing fee!

As it turns out, time-sensitive deals like these aren’t just for space-age frying pans or duct tape that can withstand a nuclear holocaust. They can also apply to certain financial trades, like good-this-month orders, or GTMs.

GTMs are trade requests that expire at the end of the month if we don’t execute them, in the same way that offer codes expire if we don’t use them. Basically, we tell our broker what we want (for example, we only want to sell these 500 shares of ABC Company’s stock if its share price increases to $19.95 or better), and then they sit on our potential trade until the end of the month, when stock prices tend to see a little bump. If we don’t ask them to execute the order before the month ends, or if the conditions aren’t met, it automatically expires and goes away.

But wait, there’s more!

Whatever we ask our broker to do, we’re not necessarily locked in to that potential trade for the duration of the month. For the most part, if we decide to make a change—like deciding we only want to sell if the share price increases to $22.50 instead of $19.95—then we can do that. But depending on our investment firm, we may end up paying a separate processing fee for that.