Disclosed quantity (DQ) is an order feature that lets you place a large order while showing only a part of it in the order book. The market sees just the disclosed slice; as each slice fills, the exchange automatically reveals the next one, until your whole quantity is done.
Why hide part of an order?
Because a big visible order moves the market against you. Imagine Lakshmi wants to sell 50,000 shares of Himalaya Agro (a fictional company) in a stock that usually trades a few thousand shares per price level. If she parks the full 50,000 on the ask, everyone sees it in the order book. Buyers pull back, other sellers undercut her, and the price drifts down before she has sold much.
With disclosed quantity, she can place the order for 50,000 but disclose, say, 5,000. The book shows a modest 5,000-share ask, nothing alarming. When those 5,000 sell, the next 5,000 appear at the same price, and so on, ten slices in all.
How does it behave in the queue?
Each freshly revealed slice joins the price queue as a new arrival. It goes to the back of the line at that price, behind orders that were already waiting. That is the cost of hiding: you give up some time priority every time a slice refreshes. (See how does order matching work on a stock exchange? for how price-time priority queues work.)
A few ground rules, common across exchanges:
- The disclosed slice cannot be tiny relative to the order, and it can never be the whole order. Exchanges set a minimum disclosed quantity as a fraction of the total: for equity, at least 10% of the order quantity; for commodities, at least 25%. And the disclosed quantity must always be less than the total. You cannot set it equal to the full order (that would hide nothing), so such an order is rejected.
- The hidden remainder is real and firm; only its display is deferred.
- If the order lapses at the close (Day validity), the entire remaining quantity (hidden and shown) lapses with it.
How is this different from an Iceberg order?
They solve the same problem at different layers. Disclosed quantity is an exchange-level feature attached to a single order. An Iceberg order is the broker-level, productised version: it splits one large parent order into multiple separate child orders and releases them one by one. Rupeezy offers this. See Iceberg order and its applications for how it works and when it is the better tool (for example, in F&O where single-order size limits also come into play).
| Disclosed quantity | Iceberg | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it lives | One order at the exchange | Parent order at the broker, child orders at the exchange |
| What the book shows | The disclosed slice | Only the current child order |
Things to keep in mind
- Hiding size costs speed: every revealed slice rejoins the back of the price queue, so a DQ order usually fills slower than a fully visible one.
- Watchful traders can still spot a "refilling" quantity at one price, so disclosure reduces, not eliminates, your footprint.
- The minimum disclosed quantity is 10% of the order for equity and 25% for commodities, and it can never equal the total. These thresholds are set by the exchange and can change. Check the current rule before relying on it.
- For most retail-sized orders in liquid stocks, plain visibility is fine; DQ earns its keep mainly when your order is large relative to what the stock normally absorbs.
Read next
What is an odd lot? — What happens when your quantity does not fit the standard lot.