EA is running but not taking any trades

Causes, most likely first

1. The strategy simply has no valid setup right now

This is the most common answer and the hardest to accept. A selective system can go days without a signal, and ours is deliberately low-frequency — roughly ten trades a month on XAUUSD. Before changing anything, check the Experts tab: a working EA logs its scans, and seeing "no signal" repeatedly means the EA is fine and the market is not offering what it waits for.

2. A gate is blocking every scan

Most well-built EAs run a chain of pre-trade checks and skip the scan if any fails. Ours checks the daily lockdown, a loss-streak pause, a per-symbol cooldown, session hours, spread, the concurrent-trade cap, multi-timeframe bias and trend strength — in that order. Any one returning false means no trade. The log names which one, so read it rather than adjusting settings at random.

3. It is outside the configured session window

Session filters are set in server time, which is usually not your local time and frequently differs by several hours. An EA configured to trade 06:00 to 21:00 server time may be idle during your whole working day. See server time vs local time.

4. The spread is above the EA's limit

A spread guard refuses entries when the cost of the trade is unreasonable, and on gold spreads widen sharply at rollover, at session transitions and around news. Ours blocks entries above $1.00 on XAUUSD. If your EA has been idle at exactly the same time each day, this is usually why — see spread too high.

5. The symbol is wrong

An EA attached to a chart whose symbol it does not recognise, or configured for "XAUUSD" on a broker offering "XAUUSDm", will find nothing to trade. See wrong symbol.

Why this happens

The instinct when an EA is quiet is to loosen its settings until it trades. This is almost always the wrong move, because the filters that make it quiet are usually the ones doing the work — in our own testing the gates removed more losing trades than the entry logic found winning ones.

Diagnose in the log, not in the settings dialog. Every gate that blocks a scan should say so, and if your EA does not log its reasoning you are troubleshooting blind. That in itself is worth knowing about a product before you rely on it.

Set an expectation for frequency before deciding something is broken. If a system averages ten trades a month, four quiet days are unremarkable — and an EA that trades every day on gold is usually one that has been configured to ignore its own filters.