Robots and AI
Updated 7 October 2026, 3 min readEvery robot and every AI Bot in eTrader runs in one of two modes. In Trade mode it places orders on your account. In Signals only mode it runs exactly the same logic, but places nothing: each trade idea reaches you as a push notification, and you decide what to do with it.
The switch is per bot and per account, so the same strategy can trade one account and only advise on another.
What changes in Signals only
The strategy itself does not change. It wakes on the same candles, reads the same prices and reaches the same decisions. What changes is the last step:
| Trade | Signals only | |
|---|---|---|
| A buy or sell decision | Places the order | Sends you a notification |
| A close, a stop moved, a partial close | Carried out on the position | Sent as a notification, nothing changes on the account |
| The journal | Records the order and its result | Records the idea as a signal |
For a Tide bot, no order is placed, closed or changed while it is in Signals only. Each trade call is written to the bot's journal as a signal and sent to you as a notification. The same signal repeated within a minute is sent once, so a bot that runs on every tick does not flood your phone.
Switch a bot
For a bot from eTrader Code, running in the cloud from the terminal's Bots window:
- Press the account chip and choose Bots, then the Bots tab.
- Press Settings on the bot under On This Account.
- Under Mode, choose Trade or Signals Only.
- Press Save.
A bot in Signals Only mode says so on its row in the list, so you can see at a glance which of your bots are trading.
Switch an AI Bot
For an AI Bot built in eTrader AI:
- Open the AI Bot and press Accounts.
- On the account's row, choose Trade or Signals only. The choice is saved as you tap it.
- Flip the account's switch on, if it is not on already.
In the terminal, the AI Bots tab of the Bots window does the same: press Settings on the AI Bot, choose Trade or Signals Only and press Save. Its row then reads Running, Signals Only.
The confirmation you see when you switch it on in eTrader AI says which mode it will run in: in Signals only, that it will send a notification for each trade idea on that account instead of placing it; in Trade, that it will place trades within the account's limits.
Where the signals arrive
Signals come as push notifications. On your phone that means the eTrader app with notifications allowed; the notifications guide covers turning them on. Every signal also stays in the bot's journal, so a notification you swiped away is not lost.
An AI Bot can also post its signals to a Telegram chat. Connect your Telegram bot in eTrader AI under Integrations, then switch on Also Post to Telegram Bot on the account in Accounts. This is for AI Bots in Signals only. Bots from eTrader Code send push notifications only.
A signal is an idea from your own strategy, not an order. Nothing happens on the account until you place a trade yourself. If you do act on one, check the price first: by the time you open the terminal, the market may have moved from where the strategy saw it.
When Signals only is useful
- A new bot. A backtest shows what the code did on past prices. Signals only shows what it does on today's market, without risking the account. Watch it for a while and compare its ideas with the chart before you switch it to Trade.
- A strategy you want to follow by hand. Some traders prefer to let a bot do the watching and keep the decision for themselves. Signals only does exactly that.
- A second account. Let a bot trade a demo account and send signals from a live one, or the reverse, with one configuration each.
For bot authors
You do not have to write anything to support Signals only. The trader picks the mode when configuring the bot, and the same script runs. In Signals only, a trade call returns a result with ok false, signal true and executed false, and trade.closeAll returns 0, so the script keeps running rather than stopping on a refused order. A bot that checks r.ok and logs the reason still behaves sensibly.