Connect a broker: Connecting TradeLocker

TradeLocker has no hosted sign-in window for other applications, so your e-mail, password and server are entered here rather than on their site. They are stored encrypted against this one connection — nothing is shared between customers, and removing the connection ends the access.

1
Copy the Server box exactly
On the TradeLocker login screen there is a Server box above e-mail and password — normally your prop firm’s name followed by the account type. Copy it as it appears there, capitalisation and hyphens included. A wrong server fails to log in rather than failing quietly.
2
The same e-mail and password you use on the platform
Those two and the server are all that is asked for. There is no key to generate and nothing to register first.
3
Leave the environment on Detect automatically
Tradeus tries the live server and falls back to the demo one, which is why the choice sits under advanced options. Funded and evaluation accounts almost always live on the live server, even where the money in them belongs to the firm rather than to you. Change it only if detection picks the wrong one.

There is no routing switch on TradeLocker

Rithmic and Tradovate each have a server-wide switch that decides whether orders reach the broker at all. TradeLocker has none. A connected TradeLocker account in an active copy group receives orders, and so does one that follows a strategy — from the moment it is connected. If you want to watch it work first, connect a demo server from your firm; everything in this handbook behaves the same way on one.

What one instrument can hold at once

A TradeLocker account usually keeps every order as its own position rather than netting them. One instrument can therefore be held as several legs, and a long leg and a short leg can sit side by side. Added up, those two come to zero — and zero is what a closed position looks like. On a leader account, read carelessly, that is the instruction to close every follower.

So the reading is all or nothing. It answers exactly what the account holds in each instrument — an explicit zero included, where Tradeus thinks something is held and the account is in fact flat — or it answers nothing at all and says which of the cases below it is in. While it answers nothing your followers are left alone, and the copier’s readiness panel carries the sentence; see Copy readiness. A refusal costs one comparison, and the next one tries again.

What it will not guess, and what it says instead

A hedge

That the account holds both a long and a short leg of that instrument, naming it, and that a hedge cannot be read as one position because its net of zero would read as closed. Close one of the two legs and the next comparison reads the account normally.

A position the account cannot name

TradeLocker reports a position under a numeric instrument id, which is mapped back through your own account’s instrument list. Where that list does not name the id, what the account holds cannot be put into symbols at all, and the whole answer is refused rather than reported under the raw number.

One name on two instruments

If two instruments in that list carry the same name, a position in one cannot be told apart from a position in the other, so the answer is refused and names it.

A list shorter than the count

Every reading asks TradeLocker two things at once: what it holds, and its own count of how many positions that is. When the two disagree something filled or closed between them, so neither is a reading of one moment — and the leg that is missing from the list is exactly what a closed position looks like.

A column your firm does not publish

Which columns a position arrives in is your firm’s choice rather than ours. If the size, the side or the instrument id is not among them, the account is refused by name instead of read, because an unpublished column reads as zero and zero means closed.

Read the sentence, not the pill

A refusal does not turn the headline off at once. For a minute the readiness panel still says Copying with the refusal under it as a warning line, and only after that does it say Not copying — a comparison that already completed stays proof this account has been compared. So the thing to act on is the sentence, never the pill.

It is asked, not told

TradeLocker publishes no position feed, so accounts are compared on a tick rather than the moment something happens: every fifteen seconds, and a comparison is held back for six seconds after Tradeus itself routes an order so that it is not reading its own work. The readiness panel quotes its own worst case at about twenty-one seconds, and your follower’s order is placed on top of that. If a trade you placed by hand looks as though it did nothing, give it half a minute before believing that.

TradeLocker also caps how often an account may be asked for its positions — often once a second — and that cap is published by your own account rather than being a number we keep. When several signals land together, the orders go out one after another inside those limits, so the second can land a second or two after the first. Nothing is dropped.

One switch decides two things

Both halves above come out of that same comparison, so one server setting — TRADELOCKER_RECONCILE — decides both of them: whether a trade you place by hand in your firm’s own platform reaches your followers, and whether a close TradeLocker made on its own (a stop, a take-profit, the firm liquidating you) reaches your trade log and your calendar. It is read when the server starts, so it is not something that can be toggled in the app. It has nothing to do with your alerts: the orders Tradeus places from a TradingView alert fan out either way, which is why the difference is invisible until somebody trades by hand and watches. Which answer is live today is kept in one place rather than two — the TradeLocker row under Which brokers work.

The stop behind a position is learned, not assumed

Where a TradeLocker deployment publishes the stop resting behind a position is your firm’s choice as well: some carry it on the position’s own row, some on an order of its own beside it. Both are read and neither is guessed — and where the only thing published is a distance rather than a price, Tradeus says it cannot tell you the level instead of saying there is none. Until a protective leg has actually been recognised on your connection the honest answer is that nobody has looked yet, and that costs nothing in practice: the first stop you set is both what proves the shape and the first one reported. Where it travels from there is in Copier or strategy?.