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Trade

Trading sessions

Run an algorithm on your account, tick by tick.

Trading on margin can lose you more than you put in. Past results, including backtests, do not predict future results. Cloud9Trader provides tools and education, not financial advice. Read the full risk warning.

A trading session runs one version of an algorithm on one instrument, in real time, on your account. It places and closes positions for you until you stop it. Start on the demo account or a broker’s practice account. Cloud9Trader asks you to confirm that accounts connected on the accounts page are demo accounts.

Start a session

Section titled “Start a session”
  1. Open the algorithm and its Trade tab, and click New Trading Session. You can also click the trade icon on a backtest or optimization result to copy its settings.
  2. Choose the Version, the Instrument and the Interval (1 minute to 1 day, default 15 minutes), and fill in any externals.
  3. Click OK. The session page opens.

Sessions need a paid plan: Basic and up include live sessions and paper sessions on the demo account, each up to a number running at once. See Plans and credits. Sessions do not use compute units.

Watch it

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The session page shows how long it has run, its positions, realized and unrealized profit and pips, a cumulative profit chart, and a price chart with its positions and anything the algorithm draws with plot(). Trading Sessions in the left menu shows how many are active.

The Daily Logs panel, which shows the session’s log and anything the algorithm writes with log(), is not working at the moment. Status changes also appear only when you reload the page.

Stop it

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Click the stop icon on the session row or page. There is no confirmation. Stopping ends the algorithm; it does not close open positions. Close them yourself, or let their stop loss or take profit close them.

Statuses

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Status Meaning
Active Running, waiting for an instance, or asleep for the weekend. The status detail says which.
Stopped You stopped it.
Errored The algorithm failed and the session ended. You get an email with the error and a report of its positions.

Weekends, restarts and safety limits

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  • Weekends. From Friday 22:00 to Sunday 22:00 UTC a session sleeps and wakes when the market reopens. This applies to crypto instruments too, even though they trade all weekend.
  • No prices for an hour on a weekday restarts the session.
  • Errors. One error in your algorithm is logged and the session carries on. Three within 60 seconds end it with Errored.
  • Runaway limits. A session ends if it asks for 50 positions within a minute or opens 500 positions in total. At most 200 can be open at once.
  • Order checks. An order with a stop on the wrong side of the price, or a stop closer than the spread, is refused and logged.
  • Unresponsive code. A session that stops answering for 10 seconds, for example in an endless loop, is ended.
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