Your EA stopped trading after a loss — and it is probably not broken

Your EA was trading fine. Then it had a bad run, hit its stop, and now it sits there doing nothing — green light, no errors, no trades. Days pass. Most people conclude the EA has broken, or that the licence expired.

It usually hasn't. There is a specific, boring reason this happens, it is very easy to miss, and almost nobody documents it.

The trap: your stop-loss can drop you below your own minimum

Nearly every serious gold EA has a minimum balance — a level below which it refuses to open new positions. The reasoning is sound: a grid or recovery strategy needs enough capital behind it to survive the position it might build. Run it on too little and the first bad basket takes the account.

Most of these EAs also have an equity stop — a hard limit that closes everything if the account falls too far in a day. Twenty or thirty percent is typical.

Put those two together and there is a hole between them:

• You fund the account at exactly the recommended minimum. Say the EA wants $1,000 and you deposit $1,000.
• A basket goes wrong and the 30% equity stop fires. It closes everything and saves you from worse.
• You now have $700.
• $700 is below the $1,000 minimum. The EA stops opening trades and never starts again, no matter how long you leave it.

One bad day and the account is retired. The protection that saved you is what switched the EA off.

Why you don't notice

This is the part that costs people weeks. From the outside the terminal looks perfectly healthy:

• The Algo Trading button is green
• The EA is on the chart and its panel is drawing
• The licence is valid and the connection is fine
• There are no errors in the log after the first one

Most EAs raise the alert once, as a popup, at the moment the balance goes under. On a VPS you are not looking at the screen, so nobody ever sees it. After that the EA simply sits quiet, and quiet looks the same as "waiting for a setup".

How to check in thirty seconds

1. Open the Experts tab in the Toolbox (Ctrl+T).
2. Scroll to the point where the EA last restarted or the balance dropped.
3. Look for a line mentioning minimum balance, seed balance or required balance. It will state the number the EA wants.
4. Compare it against your current balance.

If your EA draws a status panel on the chart, it will normally say something like BLOCKED or balance rather than waiting. That one word is the difference between "nothing to do right now" and "switched off until you deposit".

The fix, and the better fix

The immediate fix is to top the account back above the minimum. The EA resumes on its own, usually within a minute — no reinstall, no new licence, nothing to reset.

The better fix is not to sit at the minimum in the first place. A minimum is the level at which an EA will tolerate running. It is not the level at which it runs well, and it leaves you one bad day from a full stop.

There is a second reason to fund above the minimum, and it matters more than the first. On most grid EAs the lot ladder is a fixed size — it does not shrink because your account is smaller. Twelve levels is the same number of lots whether you hold $1,000 or $2,000. Running at the minimum does not reduce the position; it reduces the room around it. The same adverse move costs twice the percentage, so your equity stop trips on half the price movement it would need on a larger account.

You get stopped out more often, for smaller amounts each time — and every one of those stops risks putting you back under the minimum again.

What we changed in ours, and why

We hit this on our own fleet. Because the balance floor and the recommended deposit were the same number, every account we onboarded was one losing basket away from being switched off permanently. At one point eleven live accounts were sitting silently blocked — heartbeating, licensed, AutoTrading on, and not trading. Several had been like that for weeks. Some of those clients almost certainly assumed the software had simply stopped working.

The fix was to stop using one number for two different questions:

• The balance you need to start is the higher one. It is a recommendation about sizing.
• The balance at which it stops is lower, and is about whether the strategy can be carried at all.

An account that starts at the recommendation and is stopped out to 70% of it keeps working. It only stops when it genuinely is too small. We also made a blocked account raise an alert every day instead of once, so it cannot sit unnoticed.

If you run any grid or recovery EA, it is worth finding out which of these two behaviours yours has. It is the difference between a bad week and a dead account.

Related

• MT5 EA not trading? 11 reasons, in the order to check them
• How much money do you actually need for a gold EA?
• Is grid trading safe?

Trading forex, gold and CFDs on margin carries a high level of risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Grid and recovery strategies can accumulate exposure and incur significant drawdown. An EA that is running correctly can still lose money, and you may lose some or all of your capital. Nothing here is financial advice. Please read our full Risk Disclosure.