Stop level versus freeze level: what the spec window tells you

[LondonScalper]

Two settings that most people never look at until an order gets rejected: stop level and freeze level. I had them confused for years, so here's how I understand them now, based on what I checked last week on two demo accounts.

Stop level is the minimum distance from the current price at which you can place a stop loss, take profit or pending order. If it's 0, you can place them right at market. If it's, say, 20 points on a 5-digit quote, a stop placed 1.5 pips away gets rejected.

Freeze level is different. It's the distance within which you cannot modify or delete an order that is close to being triggered. Price comes near your pending order or stop, and the platform locks it.

In MT4 you can see both under the symbol's Specification window. On my raw account, EURUSD shows stop level 0 and freeze level 0 there. On a different broker's standard demo, gold shows a non-zero value for both.

Why it matters to a scalper: if you trail stops tightly or move a take profit as price approaches, a freeze level means your modification may simply fail at the moment you most want it. I learned this on gold when a modify request kept returning "invalid stops" a few cents from my target.

Check both values on every symbol you scalp. It takes two minutes.

[Shadow Trader]

One detail that tripped me for a while: the stop level number in the spec window is in points, not pips. On a 5 digit EURUSD quote a stop level of 20 is 2 pips, but on gold with 2 digits the same 20 means 20 cents.

The sketch below shows how it plays out on gold. Price at 2,410.00, a stop level of 50 points means nothing can be placed inside 0.50 either side, and a freeze level of 30 means an order within 0.30 of price is locked.

img_13026.png (71.69 KiB) Viewed 23 times

So a take profit sitting 0.25 away is frozen. You can't pull it closer or cancel it, and that's exactly the gold modify failure you described.

The other gotcha is that some brokers change both values around rollover or news. I've seen a gold stop level go from 0 to a few hundred points at 23:59 server time.

Have you checked whether your values stay fixed through the day, or only looked during London?

[Shadow Trader]

Worth adding for anyone running an EA: the errors you get back are different and worth logging separately. Stop level problems usually show as invalid stops on placement, while freeze level hits come back when modifying or deleting.

If your EA just retries the same request in a loop, a freeze level will make it hammer the server for nothing, and some brokers don't like that at all.

What I built in was a check before every modify. Read the freeze level for the symbol, compare it to the distance from price, and skip the change if it falls inside, logging that it was skipped.

The second thing is that MT5 reports these slightly differently, and on some symbols the spec window shows 0 while the server still rejects tight modifies. I'd test with a few deliberate tight orders on demo before trusting the number.

Has anyone seen a broker that shows 0 in the spec window but behaves like it's non zero?