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Live trading is switched on per strategy, from the Armed tab. Each armed strategy gets its own account, its own size, and its own behaviour settings — nothing is global.

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Switch it on

1

Open the Armed tab and find the strategy

Only intraday armed strategies offer the control, and only once you have a verified broker connection. Press Turn on on the Trade live row.
2

Pick the connection and the account

If you have more than one verified connection, choose it here, then choose which of its accounts to trade.
3

Set contracts per signal

The number of contracts every entry from this strategy will be for. It is a fixed size — Live trading does no position sizing, and never pyramids. Whatever you set here is the most this strategy can ever hold.
4

Set what happens when things go sideways

Open the What to do when things go sideways section and read through it once. Every setting has a sensible default, and every one of them can be changed later while the strategy is running — but the defaults are the behaviour you’ll get on the very first signal, so it’s worth a minute now. See the full reference.
5

Start trading (demo)

The button says so on purpose. Every new Live trading strategy starts in demo.

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Demo first

Live is locked until a strategy has completed a clean demo day. The live option in the Mode dropdown stays disabled — labelled “after a clean demo session” — until this specific strategy has:
  • at least one completed demo trading day (a session date earlier than today on which real signals were actually applied), and
  • zero recorded differences on that history.
A single divergence — a phantom trade, an unexpected fill, a manual intervention — keeps it in demo. That is the point: the demo day is not a waiting period, it is a proof.
Once it unlocks, switch Mode to live on the same row. The change takes effect immediately, on the next signal.
The mode chooses which broker environment this strategy connects to, and the account you picked must exist there. If it doesn’t — a demo connection whose account list doesn’t include it, say — the strategy will not start and Live trading turns itself off rather than trading into the wrong place.

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What happens on the first signal

  • If the strategy wants a resting entry, Live trading places it at the broker as a bracket order: the entry plus its stop and target, attached, so the protection goes live at the moment the entry fills. A level that moves bar to bar is modified in place, not cancelled and re-sent.
  • If the strategy wants a market entry, Live trading sends it and expects a fill within about ten seconds.
  • Stops and targets rest at the broker. A trailing stop is moved by Live trading to the level the strategy computes at each bar close — deliberately not a broker-side trailing order, which would ratchet on ticks and trade a different strategy from the one you backtested.
  • Time exits and rule-based exits are sent by Live trading as market orders, with the bracket cancelled first.
  • Partial fills are real: the bracket is resized to what actually filled.

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Changing settings later

Press Settings on the Trade live row, change contracts per signal or any of the sideways settings, and Save. Changes apply to the running strategy from the next signal onward. They do not retroactively change a position you are already in — a bracket already resting keeps the size it was placed with.

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Pausing

Pause stops new entries going out. What happens to orders and positions you already have is your When you pause setting — by default, everything stays exactly where it is and keeps being managed. Pausing the armed strategy itself (in the Armed tab) does the same thing to Live trading: the same setting applies.

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Turning it off

Turn off ends Live trading for that strategy. What happens to an open position is your When you turn Trade live off setting — by default, the position is flattened and working orders are cancelled. The confirmation dialog tells you which of the two you’re about to get.
Arming a new version of a strategy ends Live trading on the old one. AskFutures keeps one armed version per strategy, so arming a refinement disarms its predecessor — and Live trading treats that exactly like being turned off, applying that setting to any open position. Turn it on again on the newly armed version; it does not carry over, and neither do its settings.

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Next steps

When things go sideways

Every setting, what it governs, and when to change the default.

Positions and controls

Where you watch it, and the buttons that stop it.