"Your EA Is Not Trading": Why Waiting and Being Broken Look Identical From Outside

The most common message a seller receives is some version of "your EA is not trading". Almost always the EA is working exactly as designed. The problem is that from the outside, an EA that is waiting and an EA that is broken look identical — both do nothing.

A breakout system that only fires when price clears a channel will sit still for days in a range. A system with a trading-hours window is idle for most of the day by construction. A backtest compresses years into a chart and hides this: 300 trades over eight years is roughly one trade every ten days, and the gaps between them are invisible in a summary table.

Market conditions have not met the entry rule. The current hour is outside the permitted window. Spread is above the configured ceiling — common on gold at rollover. A news filter has paused new entries. A daily-loss or consecutive-loss guard has stopped the EA until the next session. The calculated lot rounded to zero because the balance is too small for the symbol. Weekend. Only after all of these does "something is wrong" become likely.

We treat an EA that gives no reason for waiting as incomplete, because the user cannot distinguish it from a dead one. Our EAs write a log line for each skipped entry naming the actual reason and the actual numbers — the measured spread against the limit, the indicator value against the threshold, the name of the news event. There is also an hourly heartbeat with balance, equity and open positions, so a live terminal can be told apart from a stalled one within an hour.

Open the Experts tab and read the last lines. If they name a condition, the EA is alive and waiting, and the log tells you which rule is holding it back. If nothing has been written for hours while the market is open, that is the case worth reporting — and with the log in hand it becomes a specific question instead of a guess.

Our three best-selling EAs: GOLD NEURON (AI) https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/187329 · ATLAS PORTFOLIO https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/182751