The trading terminal works identically on paper and live — Buy, Sell, Close and Flip, market or limit. This page is about the part that changes when the venue tag reads LIVE: real fills, real fees, and the guards that stand between one click and your capital.
A terminal always trades one venue. There is no venue picker inside it — the venue is the page — so a strategy running both paper and live has two terminals, and an order only ever lands on the one you are looking at. The PAPER or LIVE tag beside the exchange name is the single most important thing on the screen.
Starting a discretionary session#
You do not need an automated strategy to trade by hand. On the Venues page, Manual Sessions and New Session create a discretionary venue — choose the market and the environment, Paper or Live. Live sessions need a connected exchange; paper ones need nothing. Sessions and strategies built for hand-trading carry a ⚡ Manual tag, and the Sessions list is built for switching quickly between the markets you are actively working.
You can equally open the terminal on a venue an automated strategy runs — to take a profit early, cut a position by hand, or add to a winner. See below for how the two hands share the wheel.
How a manual order is sized#
You do not type a size per order. Every order on a venue — manual or from
the strategy — uses the venue's per-order size: a percentage of its
allocation, shown in the terminal's SIZE cell as, say, 50% · $5,000.
Click the cell to change it; the change applies to every subsequent order
on that venue, including the strategy's own, which is exactly why it lives
on the venue and not on the button.
Funds come from the venue's balance — Deposit and Withdraw are on its Settings tab — and the account-level Risk Guard ceiling for the book can clamp the effective size further at execution time.
What can block an order#
There is deliberately no confirmation dialog — a discretionary trader confirming every click would stop using the confirmations within an hour. The safety lives in guards instead:
- No funds on the venue: the order is refused until you deposit.
- A five-second cooldown between manual orders on the same venue, so a double-click cannot become a double position.
- Risk Guard: when the book's guard has tripped — daily loss cap spent or position cap full — new entries are blocked for the rest of the day. Manual orders get no exemption; that is the point of an account-level brake. Closes are never blocked.
- A stale price: if the live price is unavailable, a market order is refused and the terminal asks for a limit price instead.
Feedback is immediate either way — a flash on the button with the fill price, or the reason it was refused.
Two hands on one venue#
A manual order does not pause the strategy mapped to the venue. Its signals keep arriving, and they can close or flip the position you just opened. When you want the terminal to be the only thing trading a venue, turn off signal-following in the venue's Settings first — the terminal banners a reminder whenever you trade a venue that is still following its strategy.
That interaction cuts both ways, usefully: leave signals on, and manual trading becomes supervision — the strategy runs its rules and you reserve the right to overrule it by hand, with both sets of trades landing in the same venue, the same Positions view and the same statistics.
Manual live trades count against the same Risk Guard daily-loss and position budgets as everything else on the live book. A discretionary losing streak can trip the guard and halt your automated strategies' entries too — by design. The guard protects the account, not the workflow.
Practise where it is free#
Every control here behaves identically on a paper venue. If you have not placed a manual order before, open a paper session and learn the rhythm — sizing, the cooldown, Close versus Flip — where a mistake costs nothing. See the trading terminal for the full tour of the controls themselves.