Letting the engine trade for you

There’s a dial here, not a switch. At one end you approve every trade before it happens. At the other the engine acts on its own and tells you afterwards. Most people want to start at the first end and move along it slowly.

Approvals, and why they expire

With approvals on, a strategy that wants to buy doesn’t buy. It asks, and waits for you.

Those requests expire after a couple of minutes, which surprises people the first time. It isn’t impatience — it’s that the request was based on a price, and a price two minutes old is a different proposal from the one you’re being shown. Approving a stale one would mean buying something at a price that no longer exists.

So an expired approval is not a missed opportunity so much as a question that stopped being the question. If they’re expiring regularly and it bothers you, that’s a sign you want a different autonomy setting rather than a faster mouse.

The account setting wins

Autonomy is set per strategy and account-wide, and the account-wide one wins.

A strategy set to trade automatically inside an account set to require approval will still wait for you. That’s deliberately the safe direction — you can always tighten everything from one place without auditing every strategy — but it does catch people out when a strategy they thought was autonomous sits there politely asking.

The account-wide switch has a partner that catches people too. While execution mode is Manual, approvals are locked on, and the approval switch can’t be moved. Say your strategy fired on AMD at 9:34 and you want it to buy without you next time: turning off “require manual approval” won’t work until you’ve switched execution mode to Auto. Doing that turns approvals off in the same step.

Halting versus stopping

These sound like the same thing and are not, and the difference matters most on the day you’re worried.

Halt stops new positions being opened. Your existing protective stops keep working, and the engine keeps managing them.

Stop the engine stops everything, including managing those stops. A software-managed stop stops being managed.

If you’re nervous about the market, halt. If you’re worried the software itself is doing something wrong, stop it — and then be aware that anything relying on the engine to exit is now relying on you instead.

Signing out changes nothing

Worth stating plainly because it’s the assumption people make: closing the tab does not stop your engine. Strategies keep evaluating and stops keep working while nobody is watching the screen. That’s the point of the thing — but it does mean “I’ll deal with it later” is a decision rather than a pause.