Freshness, and failing closed
live, held, stale, degraded, disconnected - what each one means, and what stops working in each.
Prices and positions are only worth acting on if they are current. Propcockpit decides that on the server rather than in your browser - a background tab's timers slow to once a minute while the connection keeps delivering, which is the worst possible moment for a page to decide for itself that everything is fine.
The five states
- live - the instrument is ticking.
- held - the market is closed and this is the mark the venue settles against. It is a usable price: nothing pauses, and a resting order can still be placed. A market order sent into a closed session comes back refused, and the ticket says so before you send one.
- stale - the price is missing or too old to rely on, including when the account cannot resolve an instrument you asked to watch. These unresolved instruments also count as stale in the feed summary. Placing and modifying stop; closing does not.
- degraded - partial service. Either the broker link is re-authorising this account, or something you are looking at or holding has gone quiet.
- disconnected - no usable link to the broker at all.
Unknown fails closed
Everything that could add exposure - placing an order, moving a stop further away - stops when the state is not one Propcockpit can vouch for. Everything that can only remove exposure remains available where the venue link can still send it: Close, Flatten, cancelling a pending order, and setting or tightening a stop loss. An unavailable connection cannot deliver these actions; broker-side stops remain in place. After reconnect, risk-increasing actions wait for current broker balance and valid currency conversion as well as the reconciled positions.
A quiet instrument is not a broken feed
Your broker sends a price when the price moves. A calm hour on a minor pair is not an outage, and the connection pill answers the question you are actually asking: whether the link, the instrument on your screen, and the instruments you have money in are all current. Other watchlist rows that have gone quiet are counted beside it rather than turned into a cockpit-wide warning.