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How to tell if your EA stopped trading

Updated August 2026 · written by a trader who found out the slow way

An Expert Advisor doesn't announce that it has stopped. There's no error popup, no email, no red banner. It just quietly does nothing, and your equity curve goes flat while you assume the market is quiet. The traders this catches aren't careless — they're the ones whose EA had been running fine for months, which is exactly why nobody was checking.

Every way an EA silently stops

• AutoTrading is off. The single most common cause. One accidental click of the toolbar button, or a terminal restart that comes back with it disabled, and your EA sits on the chart doing nothing.
• The terminal or VPS restarted. Windows updates reboot machines on their own schedule. If MetaTrader isn't set to start automatically — and to reload the profile with your EAs attached — the platform simply never comes back.
• The chart was closed or the EA was removed. Closing a chart removes the EA attached to it. If the profile isn't saved, it won't return after a restart either.
• Broker connection dropped. The terminal is running, the EA is loaded, but the connection status shows no ticks. Nothing executes.
• Password changed or the session expired. Common after a broker migrates servers or you change credentials on another device.
• Not enough free margin. The EA tries, the trade is rejected, and unless it logs loudly you'd never know it has been failing all week.
• The EA errored and paused its own logic — an invalid stop, a symbol that doesn't exist on that broker, a division by zero in an edge case.
• Market conditions the EA is waiting for — genuinely idle, not broken. This is the one that makes the others hard to spot: "no trades today" always has an innocent explanation available.

Checking manually (works only while you're at the terminal)

1. The smiley face in the chart's top-right corner. A smiling face means the EA is loaded and allowed to trade. A sad face or a small ✕ means it is loaded but blocked — usually AutoTrading.
2. The AutoTrading button in the toolbar must be green. Red means nothing will execute, no matter how healthy the EA looks.
3. The Experts tab in the Toolbox (Ctrl+T). A working EA writes log lines. Silence since yesterday is a bad sign; errors are a worse one.
4. The Journal tab for platform-level events — disconnects, logins, restarts.
5. Connection status in the bottom-right corner. If it isn't showing an active connection with ticks, nothing else matters.

The problem with every in-terminal solution

The natural instinct is to have the EA itself send you a Telegram message if something goes wrong. That works for the polite failures — a rejected order, a margin problem — and not at all for the ones that actually cost money.

A dead terminal cannot report its own death. If the VPS is off, the platform crashed, or Windows is sitting on a reboot screen, the EA that was supposed to alert you is gone too. Same for any alerting built into the EA, the platform, or a script on the same machine. The failure and the alarm share a single point of failure.

Detecting silence has to happen somewhere else. The pattern is a heartbeat: the terminal sends a small "still here" signal every few seconds, and a service elsewhere watches for the gap. When the heartbeat stops, that service — which is still alive — tells you.

Reducing how often it happens

• Run on a VPS, not a laptop that sleeps. A home PC is a single power cut away from a flat equity curve.
• Set MetaTrader to start with Windows and save your profile so charts and EAs reload automatically after a reboot.
• Control the update schedule on the VPS so restarts happen at the weekend rather than mid-session.
• Check the Experts log weekly even when everything looks fine — repeated rejections hide well behind an unchanged balance.
• Keep one alert for silence, one for margin level, and one for daily drawdown. Three messages that only fire on transitions won't train you to ignore them.

What "offline" should actually mean to you

An offline alert isn't only about the EA not opening new trades. The worse case is positions already open while the terminal is dark: nothing is managing them, trailing stops aren't moving, and any logic that would have closed them at a level is simply absent. Broker-side stop loss and take profit orders still work — which is a good reason to always have them on the server rather than only inside your EA's logic — but everything else is paused until the terminal returns.

That's the real reason to want the message in ninety seconds instead of on Sunday evening.

More guides: Telegram alerts for MetaTrader · Monitor multiple MT4/MT5 accounts · MT5 on multiple monitors

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