Free Margin: Why Your Gold EA Stopped Trading
TL;DR If an EA has gone quiet, check free margin before anything else. Free margin is equity minus the margin already locked in open trades, and it is what the next order is paid for from. Gold eats margin quickly, and an EA holding several positions can run out while the account still shows a healthy balance. The Journal usually says not enough money.
The four numbers in the terminal
- Balance — closed-trade money. It does not move while a position is open.
- Equity — balance plus or minus what open positions are currently worth. This is the real number.
- Margin — the deposit locked against open positions.
- Free margin — equity minus margin. What is left to open anything new.
An EA asks the terminal for free margin before it sends an order. If the answer is too small for the position it wants, the order never leaves the platform — and nothing in the chart tells you that happened.
Why gold drains it faster than expected
A standard gold lot is 100 ounces. Near a $2,400 price that is a $240,000 notional, which at 1:100 leverage locks about $2,400 of margin.
Hold three 0.10 lot positions and roughly $720 is locked at that leverage. On a $1,000 account that leaves $280 of free margin before any floating loss — and floating losses come out of equity, which drags free margin down further while the trades are still open.
This is why the problem appears in clusters: the EA opens trades happily, then stops, then resumes once something closes.
Reading the Journal
The Journal tab in MetaTrader records every order attempt, including the refused ones. Common entries when margin is the cause:
not enough money— the classic. The order was rejected for insufficient free margin.No moneyor error 134 on MT4 — the same condition.invalid volume— a different problem: the calculated lot size is below the broker minimum or off the step size.
If the Journal shows nothing at all, the EA never tried, and margin is not your answer — look at the trading window, the spread filter, or auto-trading being off. The full checklist walks that path.
The margin call ladder
Two levels sit below the quiet stage, and both are set by the broker rather than the EA:
- Margin call level — equity has fallen to a set percentage of used margin, commonly 100%. A warning, and usually the point where no new positions can open at all.
- Stop out level — commonly 50%. The broker starts closing positions, largest loss first, to protect itself.
A stop out is not risk management on your behalf. By the time it fires, the decision about which trades close has been taken out of your hands.
Fixing it properly
The reflex is to raise leverage, because it reduces the margin each position locks. It does work, and it treats the symptom: the positions were too large for the account either way.
The durable fixes are smaller: cap the number of simultaneous positions the EA may hold, size each one from equity rather than balance, and check the total exposure rather than the per-trade risk. Five trades at 1% is a 5% position in one instrument that tends to move together.
Run the numbers in the risk calculator before raising anything — it shows what the combined exposure does to the account across a losing run, which is the scenario that produces the margin squeeze in the first place.
Questions we get
What does "not enough money" mean in MetaTrader?
The broker rejected the order because free margin was too small for the position the EA requested. It is a margin condition, not a bug in the EA, and it appears in the Journal tab rather than on the chart.
What is free margin?
Equity minus the margin locked in open positions. It is the amount available to open anything new, and it falls both when positions are opened and when existing ones move against you.
Why does my gold EA open some trades and then stop?
Typically free margin running out as positions accumulate. The EA keeps requesting orders and the broker keeps refusing them until something closes and releases margin.
Will more leverage fix it?
It reduces the margin each position locks, so the EA can keep opening trades. It does not reduce what those trades lose if gold moves against you - it usually means the position count or size is the real problem.
How much free margin should I keep?
Enough that a normal adverse move does not take you to the margin call level. If a typical day of gold movement against your open positions would consume most of the free margin, the account is carrying too much at once.
EA gone quiet and the Journal is not obvious?
Send us the Journal lines and the account figures and we will tell you which of the usual causes it is.
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