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How AlgoDesk works
for AlgoDesk Desktop v1.0.22
Documentation / Trading / Orders, positions and accounts

Orders, positions and accounts

Four tabs of the Control Center show your accounts, their balances, your open positions and your orders: Accounts, Assets, Positions and Orders. This page explains each tab, what its colours mean, and how to cancel an order or close a position from it.

The Control Center opens below the toolbar after you sign in; the tabs sit along its bottom edge. See A tour of AlgoDesk.

Accounts

The Accounts tab lists every account your connected connections give you, with its Connection and its Name. An account appears when you connect and goes when you disconnect.

The name says what kind of account it is:

Name What it is
Local paper A practice account inside AlgoDesk, on this computer. Its orders fill against the connection's live prices and never reach your broker. Every connection except Static data has one.
Server paper Your Interactive Brokers paper account or your Tradovate Demo account. You get it when the IB or Tradovate connection's Connection type is Paper.
Broker Your real account at the broker or exchange. You get it from an Interactive Brokers or Tradovate connection whose Connection type is Real, or from a Bybit connection with your API key and secret, or from a TopstepX connection with your user name and API key. Its orders are real. A connection that carries several accounts at its venue, such as TopstepX, gives you one Broker account per account there, each named as the venue names it. Topstep runs its accounts as simulated accounts on its own side; see TopstepX.

dxFeed supplies market data only, so a dxFeed connection has a Local paper account and nothing else. Connection type is a setting of Interactive Brokers and Tradovate connections only; see Setting up a connection.

The same names appear wherever you choose an account. In Chart Trader and the Book Trader each account reads as its name and connection, for example "Local paper - dxFeed" or "Broker - Bybit"; an account of a connection that carries several reads as the venue's account name followed by the connection's name, for example "PRAC-V2-12345-1 - TopstepX".

Assets

The Assets tab shows the balances your broker or exchange reports, one row per currency or coin.

Column What it shows
Connection The connection the balance comes from.
SubAccount The account at the broker the balance belongs to.
Asset The currency or coin.
Balance How much of it there is.

Two lists above the table filter it: the first by connection, the second by sub-account. ALL shows everything. The sub-account list holds the sub-accounts of the connection chosen in the first list.

Positions

The Positions tab lists your open positions. The list above it shows one connection or ALL.

Column What it shows
Instrument The symbol.
Name The size and side: "2L" is long 2, "1S" is short 1.
Pnl The open profit or loss: green above zero, red below.
Account name Local paper, Server paper or Broker. For a connection that carries several accounts at its venue, the account's own name, as the Accounts tab shows it.
Connection The connection the account belongs to.

A position in a chart's instrument is also drawn on that chart when Chart Trader shows the same account. See Chart Trader.

Close a position

Right-click the position and choose Close. AlgoDesk sends a market order for the whole position to its account. It does not ask you to confirm, and the instrument's working orders stay where they are.

A running strategy keeps its own record of its position, built from its own orders. If you close its position here, the strategy still believes it holds it. To take a strategy out of a position, stop the strategy and choose Close position in the question that follows. See Running a strategy live.

Orders

The Orders tab lists the orders of your connected accounts, working or finished. Two lists above it filter by connection (or ALL) and by instrument type: ALL, FUTURE or SPOT.

The Control Center on the Orders tab with both filters on ALL, listing three BTCUSDT orders placed by hand on Local paper: a Working sell limit, a buy market order Filled in green at an Avg.price of 85988.9, and a Cancelled buy limit in grey, each with its Limit, Name ("SellLimit Manual", "Buy Manual", "BuyLimit Manual"), ID, Fill time and Init time

Column What it shows
Instrument The symbol.
Action Buy or Buy to Cover in green; Sell or Sell Short in red.
Type Limit, Market, Stop Limit or Stop Market.
Qty The quantity.
Limit The limit price, for limit and stop limit orders.
Stop The trigger price, for stop orders.
State Where the order is now. See below.
Avg.price The average price it filled at.
Name Who placed it. Orders you place by hand read "Buy Manual", "SellLimit Manual" and so on; a strategy's orders carry the names the strategy gives them.
ID AlgoDesk's own ID for the order.
Fill time When it filled.
Init time When it was placed.

Fill time and Init time are on your computer's clock, in its Windows time zone, whatever the Time zone in Options is. Charts keep that time zone, so the same fill reads differently in the two places: a fill at 16:13 on a computer in Dubai sits on the 08:13 bar of a chart set to New York time.

Three states have a colour of their own: Filled is green, Partially Filled amber and Cancelled grey. The others are in plain text. The states you will meet most:

State Meaning
Submitted Sent; the broker has not answered yet.
Working Waiting in the market.
Partially Filled Part of the quantity has filled; the rest is still working.
Filled Done in full.
Cancelled Cancelled.
Rejected The broker refused it. A notice says why.
Unknown Sent, but AlgoDesk does not know yet what became of it. The state changes when the broker reports the order.

Work with an order

Right-click an order:

Item What it does
View order Opens the order's details. Double-clicking the row does the same.
Copy ID Copies the order's ID to the clipboard.
Cancel order Cancels the order at the account it belongs to. It works on an order that is still live, whatever its state, for example Submitted, Working or Partially Filled. It does not ask you to confirm.

You can also cancel a working order with the ✕ on its marker in Chart Trader or on its tag in the Book Trader.

The order window

View order opens a window titled Order. It lists everything AlgoDesk knows about the order as read-only text: the instrument and its type, the connection and the account type, the action, order type and quantity, the limit and stop prices, the state and the reason, the fill price, when the order was placed (Init time) and filled (Fill time), its name and its IDs. For a connection that carries several accounts at its venue, an Account row names the account the order is on. You can select a value and copy it, for example the Guid. The window follows the order while it is open, so a fill or a rejection shows as it happens. Choose OK to close it.

Reason says why your broker refused the order, or a change to it, in the broker's own words, or why AlgoDesk did not send the order. It is empty when nothing was refused, and a fill clears it. The row shows one line; double-click it to read the whole reason in a window of its own, where you can also select and copy it.

When an order fails

When your broker rejects an order, or a cancel or change does not go through, a notice appears in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Its title names the account and connection, for example "Broker - Bybit: order rejected", and its text names the order and gives the reason. A notice goes away by itself after a few seconds; click it to dismiss it sooner.