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Trade Execution Issues ​

A signal arrived but the trade did not open, opened with the wrong size, or behaved unexpectedly. Almost every case comes down to one of a handful of causes, and you can identify which in under a minute. Work through the checks in order — the first two catch the majority of cases.

First, check: is the account halted? ​

The single most common reason a signal does not execute is that the account hit its Risk Limit and is halted. While an account is halted, TTMT blocks every new signal-driven trade on it.

How to tell: the dashboard header shows a HALTED chip and the Risk Limits panel is red.

WARNING

A halted account blocks new trades but never closes or modifies your existing positions. Resuming is one click — but read I'm Halted — What Now? first so you know whether to Resume or Recalibrate.

The halt is per-account: one halted account does not stop your others. If the next several signals on one account show nothing while your other accounts trade fine, the halt is almost certainly why.

Is the channel assigned and active? ​

The second-most-common cause. A signal only fires if the channel has at least one active account assignment. Go to Dashboard > Channels, open the channel, and confirm the assignment to the target account is set and shows active — not paused.

A paused assignment silently ignores signals. The channel itself is never "switched off"; the per-account assignment is what controls whether signals flow to that account. So a channel can look connected while its signals quietly go nowhere because the assignment is paused or was never created.

Signal not executing — full checklist ​

After the two checks above, walk through the rest in order:

  1. Account halted? See the section above — the HALTED chip in the header.
  2. Channel assignment active? See the section above — a paused or missing assignment ignores signals.
  3. Status lights. Confirm the broker and Telegram indicators in the header are green. If either is red, fix the connection first — see Connection Issues.
  4. Find the message in the Signal Log and read its status. Each status tells you a different story:
    • Skipped — valid but intentionally not run (usually a duplicate, or a close instruction for a trade you don't have). See Signal Issues.
    • Failed — TTMT couldn't build a trade from the message, or hit a broker error. See Signal Issues and Error Messages.
    • Rejected — a safety check stopped it. See Signal Issues.
    • Ignored — no active account assignment for that channel. See the assignment check above.

Signal Issues covers the deep dive on each status.

The signal was skipped, not queued ​

A signal can be intentionally skipped the moment it arrives — and when that happens, no order is placed and the signal is not held for later. It's recorded in the Signal Log with a reason so you can see exactly why. Three common causes:

The market was closed. If a signal arrives while your broker's market for that instrument is closed, TTMT rejects it immediately — it does not queue the trade to fire when the market reopens. A broker-closed market is a neutral state, not a lost connection; a countdown to reopen is a display aid, not a promise that the signal will run then. If you want a channel's off-hours signals to trade, you have to be watching a market that's actually open.

A blocked-hours schedule was active. If you set up blocked trading hours (on the account, on the channel, or through a profile), a signal that lands inside a blocked window is skipped, not queued — same as market-closed. Blocked windows are periods trading is paused, and account and channel blocks combine, so a window blocked by either one blocks the signal. Check the channel's Hours tab and your account schedule if signals go quiet at predictable times of day.

A blacklisted term matched. Channels can carry a text blacklist — a list of terms that, if they appear in a message, stop it before it's ever read as a signal. A matched message is skipped with a blacklist_match reason in the Signal Log. Replies are exempt, so close/modify follow-ups still work even if the original wording would have matched. If a channel's signals suddenly stop trading, check its Filters tab for a term that's catching them. See Signal Issues.

Wrong lot size ​

TTMT never uses the lot size written in the signal. It always computes volume from your own settings. If the size is wrong, work through these in order:

TIP

TTMT ignores the lot size in the signal entirely. Your size always comes from your own settings and caps.

  1. A Config Profile on the channel is overriding your account's default lot size. Open the channel and check whether a profile is assigned.
  2. Per-asset SL/TP defaults are not a volume override. They only set fallback stop-loss and take-profit distances for that asset class — they never change your lot size. Don't look here for volume.
  3. Platform volume backstop. TTMT applies a safety ceiling on total trade volume so a parsing glitch or oversized setting can't place a position far larger than the account could survive. If a computed size would exceed it, the trade is clamped down.
  4. Volume is split across your orders. Your total size is divided across the orders TTMT places. You choose how many layers to split the entry into (1–6, default 4); TTMT then works out how many individual orders each layer needs from your lot size and your broker's minimum lot and lot step — more size means more orders, capped at 6 per layer and 36 in total. So each individual order is smaller than your total, and the exact count depends on your size, your layer settings, and your broker's symbol rules. That's why a single order looks tiny next to your configured size. See Order Execution.
  5. Broker minimum. If a per-order size falls below your broker's minimum lot (often 0.01, but your broker's own minimum and lot step are what count), the order rounds against the broker's rules or, if it can't, fails with an invalid-volume error. This is also why very small balances produce fewer orders than you might expect — there simply isn't the size to split further. See Error Messages.

Breakeven not activating ​

The trade hit the trigger take-profit but the stop-loss did not move to entry. Common causes:

  1. Feature off — check your Trade Management settings for the breakeven toggle.
  2. Wrong trigger level — if breakeven is set to trigger on TP2, hitting TP1 won't fire it.
  3. Fast market — price hit the trigger and reversed before the broker processed the stop-loss move. TTMT writes the intended stop and retries, but extreme volatility can occasionally outpace it.
  4. A Config Profile on the channel is overriding your account breakeven setting.

Trade opened but no SL or TP ​

The signal had no stop-loss or take-profit and you have no defaults configured. Fixes:

  1. Set default SL/TP pip values per asset class in your sizing and management settings.
  2. Check your invalid-SL handling choice (skip the trade, use a default, or correct it).
  3. For channels that consistently omit SL/TP, assign a Config Profile with stricter defaults.

For the full breakdown of missing-SL/TP cases, see Signal Issues.

Orders stuck in pending ​

This is usually expected, not a bug. Layered entries place limit orders below market (for a BUY) or above market (for a SELL), and they only fill when price reaches them. If price runs in your favor immediately, the deeper layers may never fill — that is by design.

INFO

Pending limit orders that never fill are not lost trades — they were entries waiting for a retracement that didn't happen. Layer 1 (placed at market) is what gets you into the move.

You can read the entry price for each order in the trade detail. TTMT automatically cancels pending orders when the stop-loss is hit (orphan cancellation), when you configured cancel-at-TP, or when the trade is closed manually or by a signal.

One thing that can surprise you: with the Layer-1 lock on (the default), once a deeper layer fills, Layer 1's target shifts to TP1 to secure break-even. That is why a pending-heavy trade can suddenly show a near take-profit. See TP Redistribution.

Automatic Safety Pause active ​

After repeated execution failures on one account, TTMT temporarily pauses new attempts so that a broken connection or a broker outage doesn't burn through orders. You'll see a Safety Pause Active indicator.

What happens next: the pause lifts on its own. TTMT re-tests automatically after a short cool-off (a 30-second floor, around 60 seconds typically), and trading resumes once attempts start succeeding again.

One important correction: failures that are not the broker's fault do not count toward the pause. A closed market, a rate-limited request, or a position the broker briefly hadn't surfaced yet are all excluded. The pause only builds from real execution failures.

If the pause keeps re-tripping, the root cause is almost always connection or broker-side — see Connection Issues.

Per-account isolation

Each MetaTrader account has its own independent safety pause and its own halt state. One account's pause or halt never affects the others.

Examples ​

  • Halted prop account. You're three trades into the London session, your $50k prop account hits its daily-loss limit, and the next four signals show nothing on the dashboard. The account is halted — see the HALTED chip in the header. Without Risk Limits, those four signals would have kept trading you past the prop firm's hard breach line and failed the challenge.
  • Paused assignment. You followed a new channel last week but never assigned it to your live account. Its signals show as Ignored because there is no active assignment.
  • Wrong lot size from a profile. Your account default is 0.50 lots but trades from one channel keep opening at 0.20. That channel has a conservative Config Profile assigned that overrides the account default.
  • Volume cap. A computed size balloons far past what your account should ever place — a parsing glitch or an oversized setting — and TTMT clamps it down to the platform's safety ceiling instead. Without the backstop, that glitch could have placed a position far larger than the account could survive.
  • Pending that never fills. A BUY EURUSD fires, Layer 1 fills at market, price runs up 30 pips, and Layers 2–4 sit pending forever. They were waiting for a retracement that never came. That is normal.
  • Safety pause. Your broker's server goes down mid-session. After a few failed orders you see Safety Pause Active. Ten minutes later the broker is back and trades resume on their own — you did nothing. Without the pause, TTMT would have hammered a dead connection on every signal.