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Live trading uses your own broker account. You connect it once, in Settings, and every strategy you later put on Live trading picks an account from that connection. The connection form is generated by the broker itself, so the fields you see are whatever that broker requires — nothing is hard-coded in AskFutures. Today the supported broker is Tradovate, in both its demo and live environments.

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Before you start: what Tradovate requires

Tradovate gates API trading behind a paid add-on and a funded account. Check all three of these before you try to connect — a connection that cannot log in simply fails verification.
  • The Tradovate API Access add-on (about $25/month), generated in Tradovate Trader under Application Settings → API Access.
  • A live, funded account — Tradovate requires roughly $1,000 at the time you subscribe. Prop-firm and evaluation accounts are not eligible.
  • Order permission on the key, for the account you intend to trade.

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Add the connection

1

Open Settings

Broker connections live in your account settings. If the section isn’t there, Live trading isn’t enabled for your account yet.
2

Fill in the broker's fields

For Tradovate: your username, the API password you set when you generated the key, the API key ID (cid), the API key secret (sec), and the environment — demo or live.
3

Verify

AskFutures logs in once and reads back the list of accounts the key can trade. A connection is only usable once it shows verified with at least one account.
A connection is verified against one environment. A demo connection can only run strategies in demo, and a live connection only in live. If you want both, add both — they are separate connections with separate keys.

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How your credentials are handled

  • Credentials are submitted once, on create. They are encrypted immediately and are never sent back — every later read of a connection returns only its status and its accounts.
  • They are decrypted only inside the trading service, at the moment it logs in to your broker, and nowhere else in AskFutures.
  • Removing a connection removes the stored credentials with it.

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One thing to know about Tradovate Trader

Opening Tradovate Trader while a strategy is trading ends the Live trading session for up to a minute. Tradovate allows one session per login, so the desktop or web app boots ours out.Your resting orders and brackets stay at Tradovate the whole time — nothing is cancelled. Live trading reconnects, re-reads the account, and picks up where it left off. But if you cancelled or changed one of its orders while you were in there, it will find that out on reconnect and act on your After you cancel or flatten by hand at the broker setting.

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Disconnecting

A connection with a live or paused Live trading strategy on it cannot be disconnected — turn Live trading off for those strategies first. This is deliberate: disconnecting with an open position would leave you holding something AskFutures can no longer see or close.

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Next steps

Turn Live trading on

Pick the account, set the size, and start in demo.

When things go sideways

Decide the behaviour before the first signal, not during it.