Assisted Trading

Assisted trading lets Tempest turn an incoming signal into a real order at your broker once you approve it — you confirm every trade. This page covers the ENABLE switch, the per-trade approval prompt, the per-symbol gates, manual resubmit actions, and the emergency cancel and flatten buttons.

Warning: Assisted trading places real orders on your Interactive Brokers account (paper or live, depending on how you connected) with real money at your own direction. Trading futures carries substantial risk of loss. Signals are informational only and are not recommendations or guarantees. Past performance does not guarantee future results. You alone are responsible for your configuration, your sizing, and your trades. Review your settings before you enable assisted trading.

What Has to Be in Place

For a signal to become an order, all of the following must be true:

• Your license tier allows it. Assisted trading is available on the Standard, Executive, and Trial tiers. The Basic tier is view-only and the assisted trading panel is hidden entirely. See Licensing & Tiers.
• The signal's symbol is on your tier. Standard and Trial cover the micro futures (MES, MNQ, MYM, M2K); Executive adds the E-minis (ES, NQ, YM, RTY). A signal for a symbol outside your tier is shown but never traded.
• You are connected to Interactive Brokers. Orders are placed through Tempest's connection to TWS or IB Gateway. See Connecting to Interactive Brokers.
• The ENABLE switch is on, in the Signals (Assisted Trading) panel.
• You approve the trade when the approval prompt appears — unless you are an administrator with approval-skipping turned on.

📷 Screenshot: The Assisted Trading control bar at the top of the Signals panel, showing the ENABLE checkbox, the Status label, and the broker connection row with the FLATTEN ALL and CANCEL ALL ORDERS buttons.

The ENABLE Switch

The Assisted Trading control bar contains a checkbox labeled ENABLE:

• Red, unchecked (default): Assisted trading is off. Signals still arrive and appear in the Signals view, but Tempest does not place any orders.
• Green, checked: Assisted trading is armed. Eligible signals are handled according to your approval settings.

When you turn the switch on, Tempest dims the panel back in (the broker controls and tables) and begins connecting the trading engine to TWS or IB Gateway if it is not already linked. The Status label reports progress (for example, Status: Connecting to IB..., then Status: ACTIVE).

Confirmations when you have open positions

• Turning ENABLE on with positions already open: Tempest asks you to confirm, because enabling assisted trading starts automated management of those positions (bracket resubmission, scale-in handling, and so on). The prompt reads: "You have N open position(s). Enabling assisted trading will start automated management of these positions (bracket resubmission, scale-in handling, etc.)." New signals still require your approval; only management of the existing positions becomes automatic.
• Turning ENABLE off with positions open: Tempest warns that disabling assisted trading stops automated management of those positions' stops, targets, and scale-ins, leaving you to manage them manually. You must confirm.

Risk disclosure

The first time you enable assisted trading after the disclosure expires, Tempest shows a risk disclosure that you must accept before the switch arms. If you decline, the switch returns to off.

Note: If your tier does not include assisted trading, the whole panel is hidden — there is no ENABLE switch to find. This is by design, not an error.

The Approval Prompt

When assisted trading is on and an eligible signal arrives, Tempest opens a small Approve Trade prompt (titled Approve Limit Trade or Approve Market Trade) that stays on top of other windows and plays an alert sound. It shows:

To act, click APPROVE (or press the Space bar) to place the order, or Decline (or press Esc) to skip it. Closing the window also counts as a decline.

The timing depends on the order type:

• Limit-entry signals (BB / SA): the prompt opens immediately and gives you about 30 seconds. If you do nothing, it auto-declines.
• Market-entry signals (BTC / STC): the prompt opens about 30 seconds before the signal's bar closes. APPROVE stays disabled until the bar actually closes, then you have roughly 30 seconds to act before it auto-declines.

If you decline (or let it time out), the signal is recorded in the Signals Received list with the reason "User Declined", and no order is placed.

📷 Screenshot: The Approve Market Trade prompt showing the BUY/SELL badge, the Entry/Stop/Target price grid, the countdown, and the APPROVE [Space] / Decline [Esc] buttons.

When the prompt is skipped because you are already in a trade

If you already hold a position in the signal's symbol, Tempest does not show an approval prompt. Instead it passes the signal straight to the trading engine, which decides what to do with it — for example, treating it as a scale-in, or ignoring a duplicate entry. This avoids asking you to re-approve a trade you are already in. See Brackets & Scale-In for how the engine manages existing positions.

Administrator skip-approval

On specially issued administrator licenses, an extra menu item appears under the Admin menu: Skip trade approval (submit orders immediately). When checked, eligible signals are sent to the broker without the approval prompt. On administrator installs this option is on by default at each launch; you can toggle it off for the session from the same menu.

This option is enforced for administrators only — it is hidden on every other tier, and the approval prompt cannot be bypassed without it. Orders still respect your tier's symbol limits even when approval is skipped.

Note: Skipping approval means orders go to your broker with no manual confirmation step. Use it only if you understand and accept that consequence. Trading futures carries substantial risk of loss.

License-Tier Symbol Limits

Before a signal can reach an order, Tempest checks its root symbol against your tier's allowed list. If the symbol is not allowed:

• The signal still appears in the Signals view so you can watch it.
• It is recorded in Signals Received with a reason such as "Symbol NQ not on tier (Standard)".
• A warning appears in the status bar at the bottom of the window, listing the symbols your tier does allow.

This limit is enforced inside the trading engine, not just in the on-screen controls, so a signal for a symbol your tier doesn't cover cannot reach order placement. To trade a symbol your tier doesn't include, change your tier in Licensing & Tiers.

Per-Symbol Gates (Symbols Filter)

Even within the symbols your tier allows, you can pause assisted trading on individual tickers:

1. Open Tools → Symbols Filter….
2. The Assisted Trading — Symbols dialog lists each symbol your tier can trade, with a checkbox.
3. Checked (default) means that symbol is approved.
4. Unchecked means signals for that symbol skip the trading engine even when the ENABLE switch is on. They are recorded with the reason "Symbol disabled in AT settings".
5. Click Save to keep your choices, or Cancel to discard them.

This is useful for, say, pausing one ticker while leaving the others active. It is independent of your license tier's allowed list.

📷 Screenshot: The "Assisted Trading — Symbols" dialog with a checkbox per tradeable symbol and the Save / Cancel buttons.

Manual Actions

Resubmit Order

To re-send a signal that already appeared in the list, right-click it in the Signals Received panel and choose Resubmit Order. The signal is dispatched to the trading engine as an explicit, deliberate action on your part — so it does not wait for the approval prompt.

Because this is a direct operator action, it works even if the ENABLE switch happens to be off (for example, if a license re-check briefly unchecked it). In that case Tempest re-arms assisted trading for the submission, turns the ENABLE switch green, and shows a brief status-bar note that it re-enabled assisted trading for the manual resubmit.

Resubmit Order Brackets (single signal)

To place protective stop and target orders for a signal's position, right-click it in Signals Received and choose Resubmit Order Brackets. Tempest shows a confirmation with the Entry, Stop, and Target that will be used, and places the bracket when you click Yes. If the stop and target are on the wrong side of the entry ("inverted geometry"), Tempest refuses to submit and explains why, so it cannot place a backwards bracket.

Resubmit Brackets for All Open Positions (administrator)

Administrators have an account-wide option under Admin → Resubmit Brackets (all open positions)…. After a confirmation, Tempest looks at every open position reported by your broker and re-places protective brackets.

Important: This bulk action only re-brackets naked positions — positions that have no working stop and no working target on the closing side. Positions that already have a working bracket are skipped, so it cannot overwrite stops and targets you have already set. The same rule is described in Brackets & Scale-In.

Test Orders

To check that your broker connection and order routing work, use Help → Test Orders.... Tempest lists up to the last five signals received today; pick one and click Generate Order to submit it to assisted trading as if it had just arrived. A message tells you whether the order was submitted, skipped, or rejected (with the reason). Like the resubmit actions, Test Orders is treated as an explicit operator action and re-arms assisted trading for the submission if it was off.

Emergency Buttons

The broker control row contains two account-wide buttons.

CANCEL ALL ORDERS

Cancels every working order at your broker — including protective stops and targets — across the whole account. Open positions are not closed. After a confirmation prompt, the request is sent and the status bar reports when it completes.

Warning: Cancelling all orders removes the protective stops and targets on any open position, leaving it unprotected. Use FLATTEN ALL instead if you want to exit positions as well.

FLATTEN ALL

Cancels every working order and closes every open position at market. After a confirmation prompt ("This will cancel ALL working orders and close ALL open positions at market. Are you sure?"), Tempest cancels orders first so a stop or target cannot fill against the exiting market orders, then sends market exits for each open position. The request runs in the background; the status bar shows "Flatten dispatched — cancelling + market-closing…" while the orders are sent.

Warning: FLATTEN ALL closes positions at market price immediately, with no approval prompt. Market exits fill at whatever price is available, which may differ from what you expect. Use it only when you intend to exit everything right now.

The Status Label and the Signals List

The Status label in the control bar reflects the trading engine's current state. Common values include:

• Status: Initialized / Status: ACTIVE — the engine is ready or running.
• Status: Connecting to IB... — linking to TWS or IB Gateway.
• Status: WAITING — no broker connection — assisted trading is on but the broker isn't connected.
• Status: ACTIVE — order submitted, Status: skipped (no order placed), or Status: REJECTED — <reason> — the outcome of the most recent signal.
• Status: Stopped — assisted trading was turned off.

Below the controls, the Signals Received panel groups signals by ticker and shows each one's outcome — submitted, skipped, declined, or dropped with a reason (such as "Symbol disabled in AT settings", "User Declined", "No broker connection", or an "Inverted geometry - blocked" note). Open positions and working orders appear in the adjacent tables and in the Positions & Orders view.

Sizing and Bracket Behavior

How many contracts each order uses is configured separately — see Position Sizing. How the entry, stop, target, and scale-in legs are placed and managed is covered in Brackets & Scale-In.

Troubleshooting

A signal arrived but no order was placed. Check, in order:

1. Is ENABLE green? If it is red, click it to arm assisted trading.
2. Is the symbol on your tier? If the signal shows "not on tier", that symbol isn't included in your license. See Licensing & Tiers.
3. Is the symbol paused? Open Tools → Symbols Filter… and confirm its checkbox is checked.
4. Is the broker connected? If the status shows "no broker connection", reconnect — see Connecting to Interactive Brokers.
5. Did you decline or let the prompt time out? A row marked "User Declined" means no order was placed. Right-click the signal and choose Resubmit Order to send it manually.

A bracket was blocked for "inverted geometry." The stop and target were on the wrong side of the entry (for example, a stop above the entry on a long). Tempest refuses these so it cannot place a backwards protective order. This usually points to flipped levels in the signal itself.

For more, see Troubleshooting.

Related Topics

• Connecting to Interactive Brokers — set up your broker connection.
• Position Sizing — choose how many contracts each order uses.
• Brackets & Scale-In — how multi-leg orders are placed and managed.
• Positions & Orders — track open trades and working orders.
• Licensing & Tiers — what each tier can view and trade.
• Field & Term Glossary — definitions of common terms.