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Live trading is automated execution for AskFutures. Once a strategy is armed for live signals, it connects to your own broker account: every entry, stop, target, time exit and contract roll the strategy produces becomes a real order, placed for you, with the protective legs resting at the broker.
In the app the switch on an armed strategy is labelled Trade live.
Live trading places real orders with real money in the account you connect. Backtest results are hypothetical; live results will differ. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Every new connection starts on your broker’s demo environment and stays there until it has proven itself — see demo first.

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The one principle: Live trading follows

Live trading is a follower. The strategy is the same computation that produced your backtest, running forward in real time. Live trading’s only job is to keep the broker’s position matching what the strategy believes it holds. That has three consequences worth internalising before you turn it on:

Fills never change the strategy

What actually filled at the broker is never fed back into the strategy. The strategy would have produced exactly the same signals whether or not you were trading them — which is what makes the live record comparable to the backtest.

Differences are recorded, never hidden

A limit the market touched but did not fill, an order you cancelled by hand, a stop that filled on a tick the bar never showed — each one is written down with its cause and shown to you.

It stops rather than guesses

When reality and the strategy disagree, Live trading detaches for that trade instead of improvising a position. It picks the strategy up again at the next point where both are flat.

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What you need

1

An armed, intraday strategy

Live trading trades armed strategies on intraday timeframes. A daily “trade at the close” strategy stays notify-only: a signal produced after the session ends cannot be filled at a close that has already happened.
2

A verified broker connection

Currently Tradovate, demo and live. See connect a broker.
3

Live trading enabled on your account

Auto-trading is being rolled out gradually. If you don’t see broker connections in Settings, it isn’t switched on for your account yet — contact support.

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Where Live trading lives in the app

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What Live trading will never do

These are guarantees, not settings — you cannot switch them off, and neither can we by accident:
  • It never flattens your whole account. When Live trading closes a position it sends the opposite of the quantity it is responsible for. Positions you took by hand are never touched by a flatten.
  • It never invents a fill. If the strategy thinks it entered and the broker never filled, Live trading does not pretend. The trade becomes a recorded difference.
  • It never pyramids. A strategy’s position at the broker is at most the contracts-per-signal you set. There is no averaging in and no doubling up.
  • It never leaves an exit floating in the cloud. Stops and targets rest at the broker, attached to the entry, from the moment the entry fills. If AskFutures goes offline, your protection is still working.
  • It never re-enters on its own after a halt. Anything that halts a strategy needs you to resume it.

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Next steps

Connect a broker

What Tradovate requires, and how your credentials are stored.

Turn Live trading on

Contracts per signal, the demo gate, pausing and turning off.

When things go sideways

Every setting for how Live trading should behave when reality disagrees.

Positions and controls

Read the live state, repair a difference, kill a position.