MT5
Five MetaTrader settings that quietly break a working EA
The support message we get most often is some version of the same sentence: the bot is attached, the smiley face is in the corner, and it has not taken a single trade in three days. Almost every time, the strategy is fine. Something in the terminal is set in a way that stops the EA before it ever reaches the market, and none of these five produce a popup or an obvious error.
1. Algo trading is on in two places, not one
There is a global AutoTrading button in the toolbar and a separate "Allow algo trading" checkbox inside the EA's own properties window. Turning the toolbar button on does not tick the checkbox, and a smiley face only tells you the EA loaded, not that it is permitted to send orders. If you ever pressed the toolbar button while the EA was already attached, remove it from the chart and attach it again.
The giveaway is a log line saying trading is disabled by the client terminal while the EA itself looks perfectly healthy.
2. The symbol suffix
Very few brokers name gold simply XAUUSD. You will see XAUUSD.m, XAUUSDm, XAUUSD.raw, XAUUSD_ecn and a dozen others, and the suffix depends on your account type, not just the broker. An EA that has the symbol written into an input, or that trades a fixed list of pairs, will do nothing at all on an account where the names do not match.
Copy the name straight out of Market Watch. Typing it from memory is how you end up debugging for an hour.
If a bot works on a demo and does nothing on the live account, compare symbol names before you compare anything else.
3. Not enough history on the chart
Indicators need bars. A bot reading a 200-period moving average on H4 needs at least 200 H4 candles loaded, and a fresh terminal install often has far fewer. Until the history downloads, the indicator returns nothing and the EA sits still without complaining.
Set "Max bars in chart" to unlimited under Tools, then Options, then Charts, scroll the chart back a few screens to force the download, and restart the terminal once.
4. The terminal updating itself overnight
MetaTrader installs updates on restart. On a VPS this usually happens at the worst time: the terminal comes back up, the chart reloads, and if the EA was not saved into the profile it does not come back with it. Save your working setup as a template and as a profile, and check the terminal once after any update notice appears.
Two-minute health check
Smiley face on the chart, AutoTrading button green, correct symbol in the title bar, a recent line in the Experts tab, and the account number in the corner matching the one you funded. If all five are true and the bot still has not traded, the answer is in the log, not in the settings.5. A stale profile hiding the real chart
Profiles remember charts, and charts remember EAs. Open a profile from three months ago and you can be looking at a chart with an old copy of the bot on it, running old inputs, while the version you edited sits on a chart you cannot see. Keep one profile for live trading, name it, and do not experiment inside it.
The order we check things in
- Is the account the funded one, and is it connected?
- Do the symbol names on the chart and in the inputs match exactly?
- Is algo trading allowed globally and in the EA properties?
- Does the chart have enough history for the slowest indicator?
- What was the last line written in the Experts tab?
Four of those take ten seconds each. The fifth is the subject of the next post.
Bot attached but not trading? Send us a screenshot.
Message on WhatsApp