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Live trading diverges from a backtest. A limit gets touched and not filled. A tick outside the minute bar trips a resting order the backtest would never have counted. Your data feed goes quiet for four minutes. You open the broker’s app and cancel something yourself. None of that is a bug — it is what trading actually looks like. What matters is that you decide, in advance, what Live trading should do about each case. That is what the section literally titled “What to do when things go sideways” is for, on every Live trading strategy’s settings.
Every setting below has a default, and every one can be changed while the strategy is running. Changes apply from the next signal; they never rewrite an order that is already resting at the broker.

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Quick reference

Taken together the defaults say: stay in sync with the strategy, keep the protection resting at the broker, and stop rather than guess.

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If the entry order is not filled by the bar close

The situation. The backtest counts a resting entry as filled when the bar trades through its level. Your real limit or stop order can be touched and still be sitting there unfilled at the bar’s close — the queue didn’t reach you. The strategy now believes it is in a trade that you are not in.
Chasing keeps you in step with the backtest but pays for it in slippage. Skipping keeps you out of trades the market never really offered. If your edge depends on getting filled at a specific level — mean reversion into support, say — chasing can systematically buy the worst of the move; Skip this trade is often the more honest choice there. For momentum and breakout strategies, where the fill price matters less than being in the move, chase.
Partial fills. The part that filled is a real position and is treated as one; the remainder follows whichever option you chose.

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If a new entry signal arrives while one is still working

The situation. The strategy wants a different entry order than the one currently resting — a level that moved more than a price change can express, a new rule arming, or the opposite side appearing.
The same entry rule at a new price is a price modification, not a replace — Live trading moves the resting order rather than cancelling and re-sending it, so you keep your place in the queue where the broker allows it.

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If the broker reports a fill the strategy did not ask for

The situation. Something filled that the strategy does not count as a trade. The classic case: a tick printed outside the minute bar’s range, your resting stop order triggered on it, and the backtest’s rule — which only ever sees the bar — rejects that entry. Live trading waits until the end of the bar after the fill for a matching signal, and when none arrives it acts.
Keep it means exactly that — Live trading will not move the stop, will not take the target, and will not close it when the strategy exits. If you choose this, you are taking the trade over.

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When the front contract rolls

The situation. The strategy’s contract is expiring and the market’s front month moves on. The situation. You pressed Pause on this strategy — or paused the armed strategy itself. No new entries go out either way; this decides what happens to what is already out there.

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When you turn Trade live off

The situation. You turned Live trading off — or the strategy was disarmed, which includes AskFutures disarming it because you armed a newer version.
The confirmation dialog tells you which of these two you are about to get. If you choose to leave the position, write down that you now own it — nothing in AskFutures will close it for you.

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If the signal feed goes quiet while in a position

The situation. No signal has arrived for three minutes while the instrument’s day session is open. Market data outage, an evaluation problem, anything. The strategy has stopped telling Live trading what it wants, and the run is flagged signal feed stale.
The default is right for most people, and the reason is structural: your stop and target live at the broker, not in AskFutures, so a signal outage does not leave you unprotected. Pick Flatten only if being out beats being unmanaged for you — it will realise losses that the strategy’s own stop might never have taken.
The flag clears by itself as soon as signals resume.

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After you cancel or flatten by hand at the broker

The situation. You went into the broker’s own app and cancelled or changed one of Live trading’s orders.
  • You cancelled it — it’s recorded, the attached brackets die with it, and Live trading stops following this trade (if the strategy later “fills”, no exit is sent for a position you don’t hold).
  • You modified it — Live trading keeps following the strategy but stops moving that particular leg. You own it now, and the run view says so.
This setting is about Live trading’s orders. If you traded the account yourself — bought or sold the instrument by hand — that is a different thing entirely, and Live trading asks you about it directly. See when you also trade the account by hand.

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If the broker drifts from the strategy and it does not self-resolve

The situation. A difference between what Live trading should have at the broker and what is actually there has persisted — a bracket leg that went missing, an exit that no longer covers the position, an order of Live trading’s own that shouldn’t be there. These are the same bounded repairs the Fix button applies on the Positions page; this setting decides which of them happen without you. How the automatic repairs behave:
  • A repair only fires after the same repair has been needed continuously for about a minute — long enough that ordinary in-flight settling (a chase, a pending cancel, a fill racing the next signal) resolves first.
  • After three attempts on the same repair, Live trading gives up on it and says so rather than fighting the broker or fighting you.
  • No repair ever opens, reverses or enlarges a position. Taking a position — Match strategy — is always your decision, never automatic.
Leaving this at the default is the safe choice, and it is the default for a reason: a position sitting at the broker without its stop is the one situation where waiting for a human is the more dangerous option.

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Give up an entry if slippage exceeds (ticks)

A ceiling, in ticks, on how much slippage you will accept on an entry. Leave it empty for no limit — which is the default.
Read this before you set a number. Live trading has no live executable quote at the moment it sends an order, so it cannot prove in advance that a market order will fill inside your budget. The guard is therefore deliberately conservative: with any value set, every exposure-increasing market order is not sent at all — market entries, the market order that completes a chase, and the re-entry side of a contract roll.A blocked entry is treated exactly like a broker rejection: you stay flat, and the strategy’s trade is recorded as one you didn’t take. Setting this value also disables Match strategy for the strategy.What is never blocked: risk-reducing orders (flattens, exits, the exit side of a roll) and priced orders (resting entries and bracket legs).
In practice: leave it empty unless you deliberately want a strategy that only ever takes resting limit and stop entries and skips everything else. Slippage on every fill is measured and shown in the run view either way — this setting is not what makes that reporting happen.

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Safeguards you don’t configure

These are always on. They are not settings, and no combination of the choices above turns them off.
Stops and targets are placed at the broker, attached to the entry, as a pair where one cancels the other. They are working from the instant the entry fills and keep working whether or not AskFutures is reachable.
A market entry is expected to fill within about ten seconds. If it hasn’t, Live trading stops following that trade rather than assuming a position it may not have.
A position sitting unprotected is treated as an emergency. Exit orders are never blocked by any guard, are retried and escalated when a broker rejects them, and an unprotected position raises an alert to the AskFutures team.
An entry rejected by the broker (margin, outside hours, a broker-side risk limit) leaves you flat, is recorded, and you’re told. An exit rejection is retried and escalated — it is never allowed to quietly leave a position unprotected.
A margin liquidation or a broker-side risk lock blocks the account, not one order. Every Live trading strategy on that account halts, and only your explicit Resume lifts it — and that Resume is refused while your broker still reports the account blocked.Halting rather than detaching is deliberate: a detach would re-attach at the next flat, and a liquidation leaves the account flat — Live trading would trade straight back into the block. The liquidation’s own cancels and closes are attributed to the broker, never read as your hand.
While disconnected, Live trading sends nothing — and your brackets stay resting at the broker throughout. On reconnect or restart it replays its own record of every order it sent, re-reads the broker, and matches the two up. Anything it cannot explain makes it stop following that trade. It never guesses, and it never sends an order twice.
Pause, Cancel entries, Flatten now, Skip this trade, Turn off, and the Positions page itself stay available even if auto-trading is switched off for your account or paused fleet-wide. Only the things that start or resume sending orders are withheld. You can always get out.
Every flatten Live trading sends is the opposite of the quantity it is responsible for — never a broker-level “close everything”. Positions you took by hand are untouched. See multiple strategies on one symbol.

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Next steps

Positions and controls

Where you see all of this happening, and the buttons that end it.

Several strategies on one symbol

Netting, attribution, and the question Live trading asks when you trade by hand.