Working When You're Not

I've been out of the world of the stock market for a few days, since I went away for the Fourth of July Holiday. That didn't stop my account from working for me while I was gone. Before I left, I set a few Good till Cancelled limit orders. When I returned I had email alerts telling me that some of my orders were executed and a new chunk of cash was in my account. As a reminder, when you place a limit order, the duration is either for "Today", or "Good till Cancelled". If you set it for today, and it doesn't get executed by the time the market closes, your order will expire and the money you had allocated for the purchase will be returned to your account. Good till Cancelled orders will tie up your allocated cash and be queued for execution until you manually cancel the order. Another option I often choose is "All or None." That means that if I place a limit order for a certain number of shares or contracts, the order won't be filled unless it can get all of them at that price. Without that, you might get fewer than you ordered at that price. The problem there is that if the duration of your order is for the current day, the rest of the order will expire. That's a problem if you were estimating that commissions were only a small part of the purchase price because they may become a large portion as a result. For example, let's say I place a limit order for 10 contracts at $1.00. With Scottrade, that would cost me $7 plus $1.25*10= $19.50 in commissions and $1000 for the options. So the commission is less than two percent of the cost. But, if I haven't selected "All or None" and the order expires before the whole thing gets filled, I'll be paying a higher percentage commission. Let's say only 1 contract gets bought at that price. I'd pay $7 plus $1.25 = $8.25 in commissions and $100 for the options. Now the commission is more than 8%!
So what I do is either select All or None, or make the order Good till Cancelled. The second method works, because if the order is filled at multiple times, you only pay the commission once.