Disclosed Quantity

Placing one very large order in full view of the market tells everyone what you are about to do, and the price tends to move against you before you are done. A Disclosed Quantity (DQ) condition hides the size.

The workbook's definition: "An order with a DQ condition allows the Trading Member to disclose only a part of the order quantity to the market." The rest of the order sits behind it, invisible, released in the same-sized slices until the whole order is done.

The mechanics, from Chapter 3's discussion of quantity conditions:

• The Trading Member enters the total order quantity and a disclosed quantity, which is smaller.
• Only the disclosed quantity is shown to the market at a time.
• Once that visible slice is fully traded, the next slice of the same size is automatically released into the market — and so on, repeating, until the full order quantity is executed.
• The Exchange may set a minimum disclosed quantity criteria from time to time, so a DQ condition cannot be used to make an order almost entirely invisible.

A DQ order can be combined with other order conditions the same chapter describes — for example, price conditions (limit, market) and validity conditions — but the disclosed quantity mechanism itself only ever controls how much of the remaining order is visible, not the price at which it trades.

A trading member enters an order for 1,000 shares with a disclosed quantity condition of 200.

At no point does the market see more than 200 shares of this order waiting at once — a trader watching the order book cannot tell whether the visible 200 is the whole order or the first slice of a much larger one. That is the entire point of the condition: the same 1,000-share order, entered without a DQ condition, would show the full 1,000 to every other market participant the instant it was placed, inviting the price to move away before it could be filled.

Chapter 3 (Introduction to Securities Broking Operations), section 3.2.2 on order conditions, defines Disclosed Quantity as one of the quantity conditions, alongside Minimum Fill (MF) orders, immediately after the time conditions (IOC, GTC, GTD). Expect a worked question in the style of the workbook's own illustration: given a total order size and a disclosed quantity, how much is shown to the market at any one time, and what happens once that slice trades.

• The disclosed slice size stays constant — each release is the same size as the original disclosed quantity, not a growing or shrinking amount.
• DQ controls visibility of quantity, not price. It is a quantity condition, separate from the price conditions (limit/market) and validity conditions (IOC, GTC, GTD) discussed in the same section.
• The Exchange can impose a minimum disclosed quantity — a trading member cannot set the visible slice arbitrarily low to hide an order almost entirely.
• Do not confuse DQ with a Minimum Fill (MF) order, its neighbour in the same section — MF specifies the smallest quantity an order should be filled by, an entirely different control.
• The hidden balance is still a live, working order the moment it is entered — it is not held back and entered later; it simply is not displayed until its turn.