The Order Entry box on a strategy's Risk & Orders tab decides how the bot places your entry order — and that choice is a genuine trade-off between certainty of getting filled and certainty of the price you pay.

The two choices

Limit Order Entry — ON. The bot sends a limit order: "buy, but not above this price." You either get the price you asked for or you don't get filled at all. Nothing worse than your limit can ever fill.

Limit Order Entry — OFF. The bot sends a market order: "buy at whatever it takes." You are effectively guaranteed a fill, but you pay whatever the market is asking at that instant, which on a fast-moving or thinly traded option can be noticeably worse than the price on the alert.

New strategies start with limit entries on.

Spreads are always limit orders, whichever way you set this. That is a broker rule, not a setting: no broker will accept a market order on a multi-leg ticket (a vertical, an iron condor — anything with two or more legs). So on a strategy that receives both spread alerts and ordinary single-leg alerts, turning Limit Order Entry off makes the single-leg entries market orders and leaves the spreads exactly as they were.

Example

An alert comes in on a contract quoted $1.20 bid / $1.30 ask. With Limit Entry on, the bot works a limit around that quote — if the option is already running and the ask jumps to $1.55, your order simply sits unfilled and you keep your money. With Limit Entry off, you're filled immediately at $1.55, which is 21% of your profit target gone before the trade even starts.

Order Fill Timeout

It's the number of minutes the bot leaves an unfilled limit order working before cancelling it. The default is 3 minutes.

This box is always visible, even with Limit Order Entry off, because spreads are always limit orders — so the timeout still applies to them. If you take spread alerts, this is the setting that decides how long a spread waits for its price.

Without a timeout, a limit order that never fills would sit at your broker all day and quietly hold your buying power hostage. The timeout is what guarantees that money comes back.

Example

Your timeout is 3 minutes. An alert fires at 10:02 and your limit order goes in. The option runs away and never comes back. At 10:05 the order is cancelled, the capital is released, and your strategy is free to take the next alert.

Tip

Short timeouts (1–3 minutes) suit fast intraday alerts, where a setup that hasn't filled in a couple of minutes has usually already moved on. Longer timeouts (5–10 minutes) suit slower swing strategies, where a pullback back into your price is a normal thing to wait for.

Tip for spread strategies: spreads fill on the net price of all the legs together, and on wider-spread tickers that net can take a while to come to you. A 3-minute timeout will cancel spreads that would have filled later in the session. If you take spread alerts, a longer timeout is usually the right call.

How they interact with everything else

• An unfilled limit order still holds a slot. If you've set Max Active Trades, a resting entry counts against the cap from the moment it's sent — not from when it fills. See Trade Limits.
• A cancelled order is not a trade. It doesn't count toward your daily trade limit, it doesn't appear in Trade History, and it never counts as a loss.
• Your exit rules are unaffected. Take-profit, stop-loss, trailing and multi-leg exits all behave identically either way; this setting only governs the entry.
• This setting governs alerts, not you. Any order where you type a price yourself overrules it — see below.

Tip

Fills are also where Fees & Slippage shows up. If a strategy's live results look consistently worse than its backtest, market entries are the first place to look — a backtest fills you at the alert price, while a market order in a fast option often doesn't.

Orders you place by hand ignore this setting

This switch exists to decide what happens when an alert fires and nobody is at the keyboard. It was never meant to overrule you.

So whenever you type a price yourself, your price wins — in both directions, and whatever this switch is set to:

• Picking Limit and entering a price on the Hybrid Trade page places a limit order, even on a market-entry strategy.
• Picking Market there places a market order, even on a limit-entry strategy.
• Using the ▾ beside Scale In on an open trade card rests a real limit order at your price, even on a market-entry strategy. See Live Trades.
• Using the ▾ beside Close names your exit price the same way.

Example

Your strategy has Limit Order Entry switched off, because you want alerts filled instantly. You're in a QQQ call and you'd like to double up, but only on a dip. You click ▾ next to Scale In, type 1.95, and press Enter. You get a limit order at $1.95 — the switch is not consulted, because you went out of your way to name a price.

Note

On a copy-traded strategy, the publisher's choice carries too. If they broadcast an add at a price they chose, your bot rests it at that price rather than falling back to your own setting. If their price never trades on your screen, the order is simply cancelled and your position is untouched.

Warning

One place the switch still applies on its own is an ordinary alert with no price typed by anyone. Turning limit entries off there means every alert fills at market, slippage and all.

Which should you use?

Start with limit entries on. It's the safer default: the worst thing that happens is you miss a trade, and a missed trade costs nothing. Turn limit entries off only if you find your strategy is repeatedly failing to get filled on alerts that then went on to work — and even then, consider lengthening the timeout first.