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.

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

This box only appears when Limit Order Entry is on. It's the number of minutes the bot leaves an unfilled limit order working before cancelling it. The default is 3 minutes.

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.

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.
• Some entries always go in at market regardless. A manual market entry you place yourself, and certain copy-trade follow actions where speed matters more than price, ignore this setting on purpose.

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.

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.