Entry Timing: Windows, Days, Speed, and Staggering
The Trade Entry card controls when your bot opens trades: the time window, which days, how aggressively it chases a fill, and how entries spread out.
Enter By: schedule or trigger
Enter By sets the bot's entry style. Bot Settings means the bot enters on its own using the window, day, and interval settings below. When Triggered means the bot waits for you: it only enters when you launch a One-Off trade with the green play button on the dashboard, or when a webhook tells it to open. Triggered bots are covered further in Control Bots Remotely with Webhooks.
Entry Time Window
The Entry Time Window is the daily time range when the bot may open a position. If an entry attempt fails for any reason, the bot keeps trying for the rest of the window until it fills. The window works together with the reopen setting below: with No Position, a trade that closes inside the window (by stop, profit target, or timed exit) is replaced with a fresh entry; with Staggered Days, the bot enters once at the start of the window on its scheduled days.
Days of Week to Enter
Days of Week to Enter limits entries to the weekdays you choose, or All. This only affects new entries; managing and closing an open trade continues on every market day.
No Position or Staggered Days
Open If No Position or Staggered Days decides whether the bot holds one trade at a time or builds an overlapping series:
- No Position: enter only when the bot has no open trade. Combined with the entry window, this is the classic re-enter-after-exit behavior.
- Staggered Days: enter once at the beginning of the entry window every Entry Day Interval calendar days, even if a previous trade is still open. Use this for laddered positions, and cap the overlap with Max Concurrent Trades in the Trade Conditions section (see the reference).
To run several entries at different times of the same day under one bot, switch the bot to Multi-Entry instead.
Entry Speed
The Entry Speed dropdown sets how aggressively the bot chases a fill by controlling how often it cancels and replaces its working order, adding slippage as it goes, before recalculating strikes:
| Speed | Cancel and replace | Tries before recalculating strikes |
|---|---|---|
| Turbo | Every 2 seconds | 6 |
| Fast | Every 8 seconds | 3 |
| Normal | Every 15 seconds | 2 |
| Slow | Every 30 seconds | 2 |
| Turtle | Every 60 seconds | 2 |
Faster speeds fill sooner in fast markets but give up more edge to slippage; slower speeds are more patient at the risk of the market moving away.
Randomization and sequential delay
Entry Time Randomization adds a random offset to the start of the entry window, which helps spread out entries when you run many similar bots. The offset is consistent for a bot within a day but varies from day to day.
Sequential Entry Delay is a cooling-off timer: after a trade closes, the bot waits this long before opening the next trade, even if the entry window is still open. It pairs naturally with No Position reopening to keep back-to-back losses from stacking up in minutes.
Putting it together
A typical once-a-day configuration reads like a sentence once you know the fields: Enter By Bot Settings, Entry Time Window 9:35:00 to 10:30:00, Days of Week All, No Position. That bot tries to open shortly after the market settles down each morning, keeps retrying until it fills or the window closes, and re-enters only after its previous trade has exited. Add Entry Time Randomization if you run several similar bots so they do not all fire in the same second, and a Sequential Entry Delay if re-entries after quick exits feel too eager. From there, the variations are deliberate choices: Staggered Days to ladder positions across days, Multi-Entry to ladder within a day, or When Triggered to keep the timing in your hands entirely.
For a field-by-field reference of everything in the Trade Entry section, see Bot Settings: Trade Entry and Multi-Entry.