MT5 market closed error

Causes, most likely first

1. You are inside the daily maintenance break

Spot gold closes for roughly an hour each day around the broker's rollover, typically late in the New York afternoon. The exact window is in Market Watch → Specification → Sessions, and it differs between brokers by up to an hour.

2. It is the weekend in server time

Gold closes Friday evening and reopens Sunday evening in server time. Because the server is frequently two or three hours offset from your clock, the close can arrive earlier on Friday and the open later on Sunday than you expect locally.

3. It is a holiday for the underlying market

Metals follow US market holidays, so trading may be closed or thinned on days that are ordinary working days elsewhere. Brokers publish these in advance but rarely prominently.

4. The symbol is disabled on your account type

Some account types offer a restricted symbol list, and the rejection can appear as market closed rather than as a permissions error. Check whether the symbol trades manually on the same account before blaming the EA.

Why this happens

The recurring theme in every one of these is server time. MetaTrader displays and evaluates sessions in the broker's time zone, which is usually not yours, and every session-related confusion traces back to that gap. See server time vs local time.

For an automated system, encountering market closed is not a fault — it is the platform correctly refusing an order. What matters is that the EA handles the rejection gracefully rather than retrying in a loop, which some do and which can trigger broker rate limits.

Our engine restricts trading to a defined session window well inside the tradeable hours, so it rarely meets this error at all. That window exists for liquidity reasons rather than platform ones, but it has this useful side effect.