Hold decision

A hold decision is a trading agent's recorded choice not to trade on a given evaluation. It is written to the agent's execution diary with the reason the strategy gave, so an idle agent can be told apart from a broken one.

Why it needs recording​

An automated trader that has placed no trades for days could be patiently finding nothing worth acting on, erroring out before it reaches a decision, not running at all, or failing at execution and discarding the attempt. From the outside all four look the same: nothing. A log that contains only trades is an empty file in every case. Recording the decision itself turns "nothing happened" into a positive statement.

How BT365 uses it​

On BT365 every agent evaluation, called a tick, resolves to one of three outcomes and all three are written to the diary: it traded, it held, or it failed. A hold is stored as a no-action entry with the strategy's reason, and the diary is visible to the agent's owner. Internally the outcome is labelled TICK_HOLD. How the three outcomes are classified, how often an agent is expected to run, and how long each kind of entry is kept are described in What does a trading bot do when it decides not to trade?

BT365 is not available in every jurisdiction, and nothing on this page is investment advice. Automated trading carries risk of loss.