Placing orders
The order ticket is the box floating over the chart. Buy and Sell with the lot size in the middle is the short form; the chevron (Z) opens the full ticket.
Market, Pending and OCO
- Market: fills at the current price at once. B buys and S sells with the ticket's values.
- Pending: waits for a price you choose. A buy below the market is a limit and above it a stop; a sell the reverse. Click the chart to pick the price, or type it.
- OCO (one cancels the other): two pending orders, A and B. When one fills the other is cancelled. Use it to catch a breakout in either direction.
Lots, stop, target and break-even
- Lots: the size. The unit depends on the market: lots for forex, contracts for futures, shares for stocks. The smallest size and the step come from the instrument.
- SL and TP: the stop-loss and take-profit prices. They can also be dragged on the chart.
- BE: move the stop to break-even once the trade is this many R in profit. Leave it off to skip.
- Risk and R:R: shown once a stop is set. Risk is what you lose if the stop is hit, after costs; R:R is the target's distance over the stop's.
What is an R
One R is the distance from your entry to your stop, in money. A trade that makes twice what it risked is +2R. Results in R let you compare trades of different sizes, which is why analytics shows them. A trade with no stop has no R.
If a stop and a target are in the same minute
The replay resolves fills on one-minute bars. When both a stop and a target sit inside one bar there is no way to know which came first, so the stop is assumed to fill first. This is the pessimistic choice and the trade's journal entry says when it happened.