Execution
Nothing reaches your broker on its own. A signal becomes an order at exactly one moment: when you release it in Order Management. This page describes what happens on either side of that moment: what you decide once (strategies and size), and what you do every time (the release).
Choose strategies and position size
Step 5 of the setup. Your Bridge is active, and Order Management still shows the signals greyed out: every strategy starts switched off. You decide which ones trade in your account, and at what size.
Everything here lives in Settings → Broker, on the card Account profile & sizing, together with the account it applies to — because a size only means something relative to a specific account.
The sizing basis
Account equity (live) — the size is a percentage of the account value your Bridge reports. It moves with your account.
Fixed base amount — the size is a percentage of a number you set in USD, for example to trade only part of your account. Your actual account value never enters the calculation. This is also the way out if your account is not denominated in USD.
The default position size
Between 0.5% and 15% of your basis, and 3% is a sensible start. Above 10%, the card warns you that risk concentrates quickly.
Quantity = sizing basis × position size ÷ reference priceExample: 100,000 USD × 3% ÷ 182.40 = 16 shares.
Position sizes are computed against USD prices and Ordertune does not convert. If your account is denominated in another currency, the value arrives, is shown to you, and is refused for sizing — deliberately, because reading a euro balance as dollars would put every share count off by the exchange rate and nothing about the result would look wrong. Either set the account base currency to USD, or use a fixed base amount.
Switch on strategies
Every strategy has its own switch. A strategy you switch on follows the default size, or gets its own; Reset to default takes it back.
Theoretical maximum exposure
The card adds it up for you: every active strategy at its full number of positions, all at the same time. This is the technical ceiling, not the exposure you typically hold. The more strategies you switch on and the larger the sizes, the faster it grows.
Check it, and your typical exposure as well, against two limits: what your Interactive Brokers account allows on margin, and your own risk tolerance.
Confirm
Tick I want these strategies traded in my account at the sizes shown. and click Activate & save.
Switching a strategy on does not send anything. Every order still waits for your release. You can switch a strategy off at any time; exit signals for positions you hold keep coming through until the strategy is flat.
Fine-tune your weighting in Model Performance
At the bottom of Model Performance, every strategy has its own weight, even strategies outside your plan. Change a weight and the equity curve redraws: your draft against the preset and against your saved weighting.
These are model figures applied backwards across the whole history, before slippage, commissions and taxes. They are not a record of your own account.
When a weighting fits, click Apply to my settings and confirm with two-factor authentication. From then on the Bridge uses these sizes for real orders. Strategies outside your plan stay in the draft.
Your first release
Step 6 of the setup, and from here on, what you do every day.
Signals appear
New entries appear after the previous close. Exits appear for open positions that have met their exit condition. Both land in Order Management.
Read the row
Every row shows what would be sent: symbol, side, order type, limit price where there is one, and the quantity computed from your position sizing. Read the quantity, not just the symbol — it is the number that turns a signal into a size.
Release
One click per signal. Release all releases every open signal of a section in one click. Nothing is sent until this click, and nothing that you do not select is sent.
A release goes through only if three things hold: the Bridge Terms of Service are accepted, the Bridge has reported in within the last 90 seconds, and there is a usable account value to size against. If one is missing, the release stops and names which — it does not send a partial version of what you asked for.
The Bridge picks it up
During US market hours the Bridge collects releases every five seconds, and every 60 seconds outside them. It recomputes the quantity against your live account value from Trader Workstation. If that differs from the server's figure by more than 5%, the order is refused rather than sent at the wrong size — release it again and it recalculates.
It reports back
Every fill, cancel and rejection is pushed back to Ordertune. Order Management shows the state; a rejection carries IBKR's own reason.
How fast it fills
That depends on the order type. A market order fills within seconds during market hours. A limit order waits until its price is reached. So not every order fills, even when you released all of them: whatever is still open at the end of the day expires. That is normal.
Changed your mind?
| The row shows | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Queued | Click Released to undo the release. Nothing has left yet. Undo releases takes back everything of a section that is still waiting for your Bridge. |
| At broker | Click Cancel on that row and confirm Cancel order. The cancel goes to Interactive Brokers, and the state changes when they confirm. |
| Finished or cancelled | Release again creates a new order. It is not an undo. |
On your phone
On your phone, Order Management is the Orders tab. You release from there the same way.
Order states
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Queued | Released, waiting for your Bridge to collect it. |
| Sending | On its way to the broker. |
| At broker | At the broker, live, not yet filled. |
| Filled | Executed in full. |
| Partly filled | Partly filled, the rest still working. |
| Cancelled | Cancelled — by you, or by the broker because the order could not participate. |
| Rejected | The broker refused it. IBKR's reason travels with it. |
| Expired | Never executed. Either it never left because the window it belonged to had closed, or it sat at your broker and expired with its session. |
| Replaced | Superseded by a modified order. |
| Failed | Something broke on the way. |
| Unknown | We do not currently have a reliable answer. Treated as "assume nothing", not as "nothing happened". |
Expired covers two cases that look alike and are not. Only an order that sat at your broker carries an order number; one without it never left.
Before your first live order
- Trader Workstation is running and logged in
- The Broker tab shows Active and a heartbeat from the last 90 seconds
- The Bridge Terms of Service are accepted
- Strategies are switched on, position sizing is set, and you have read the quantity on an actual row
- Read-Only API is off in Trader Workstation — otherwise everything looks healthy and only the sending fails
- You have done the whole thing once in a paper account
How many positions can be open at once
There is no fixed cap. Ordertune runs a set of institutional grade strategies, each of which can independently generate signals, and the number of open positions is simply how many of those were released and filled. The theoretical maximum exposure shows the ceiling for your selection.
Margin is worth having if you want to sustain broad simultaneous exposure. Without it, your buying power is the limit — and it shows up as refused orders rather than as a warning.
Executing manually
You do not need a broker connection. Read the signals off Order Management and place the orders yourself, or export the Basket CSV from Order Management and import the whole set into Trader Workstation in one go.
Orders you place yourself do not appear in the daily summary — that report covers what went through Ordertune.