Sweep-To-Fill Order

When you’re buying a dozen shares of some vanilla stock, executing your order doesn’t involve a lot of complications. However, big players, attempting to buy huge volumes of stock, have to use stealthier tactics.

Hence, the sweep-to-fill order. This type of market order (an instruction given to a broker to buy stock at the current market price) breaks large orders into smaller pieces. So, instead of one big order trying to get filled all at once, the sweep-to-fill consists of multiple smaller orders. These are then executed at the prices they can get...sweeping a bunch of smaller transactions to fill the order.