Documentation
Manual Trading & Orders
Manual trading is separate from strategy deployment. A manual order is an explicit action you review and submit. A deployed strategy is a rule-driven workflow that monitors and may act according to deployment settings.
Use manual trading when you want direct control over a specific order. Use alerts when you want a condition to notify you. Use strategy deployment when you want a saved strategy to operate according to its configured mode.
Main surfaces
Order entry surface for symbol, side, quantity/notional-style inputs, order controls, stop-loss/take-profit fields, validation, preview, and submission.
Review surface that summarizes the proposed order before submission, including broker/account context and validation state.
Post-submit surface for pending, accepted, rejected, deferred, filled, canceled, or error states returned through broker/order APIs.
Terminal side panel for reviewing recent orders and order lifecycle state in context with the chart and broker account.
Conditional orders
Conditional orders use a structured condition builder. Conditions can be generated from an agent proposal, edited in the builder, reviewed, and then submitted through the manual trading flow.
The condition builder supports:
- expression catalog entries,
- function selection,
- edit operations,
- type inference,
- generated human-readable descriptions,
- review/edit preservation.
Condition review
Always review the generated condition before submitting. The description is a convenience layer, not a substitute for understanding the actual rule.
Stop-loss and take-profit
The trade ticket supports stop-loss/take-profit style fields. Treat these as order instructions that must pass broker and account validation. Broker behavior can differ by asset class, account permissions, order type, market hours, and available buying power.
Symbol targeting
Manual trading can be launched while viewing charts. Confirm the symbol in the trade ticket before submission, especially when multiple charts are open. Multi-chart workspaces can make it easy to assume the active chart and ticket symbol are the same when they are not.
Validation and rejection
Orders can fail before or after submission.
Pre-submit validation may block:
- missing broker/account context,
- unsupported asset type,
- invalid quantity,
- missing condition data,
- incomplete stop-loss/take-profit configuration,
- unavailable buying power.
Broker-side rejection may still happen after Astral submits the order. Common causes include broker permissions, market-hours restrictions, account restrictions, unsettled funds, minimum size, unavailable asset, or broker-side risk controls.
Best practices
- Review account and symbol before submission.
- Confirm whether the ticket is a direct order or a conditional order.
- Check stop-loss/take-profit values in the preview.
- Keep broker/account pages open if you need source-of-truth fill data.
- Use the Orders panel after submission to verify lifecycle state.
- Do not assume a manual order is managed by a saved strategy unless it was explicitly created by that strategy workflow.