Stops Level and Freeze Level: Why Your Stop Gets Rejected

You set a stop a short distance from the market and the platform refuses it. You move it further away and it is accepted, with no explanation of what changed.

Later, with price running at your stop, you try to close the position early and the platform will not let you touch it.

These look like the same problem. They are two different limits, they are set independently, and only one of them is discussed in most writing on the subject.

Two Limits, Two Different Failures

Most explanations of a rejected stop describe a single constraint: your level was too close to the market, so move it. That is half of the picture.

MetaQuotes documentation exposes two distinct per-symbol properties. One governs whether an order can be placed at a given distance. The other governs whether an order that already exists can be changed.

The distinction matters because the two failures arrive at different moments and call for opposite responses. One is a decision you make before committing; the other arrives when you are already exposed. A third property sits alongside both, which is the price that actually fires a stop once the order has been accepted.

Read that last row carefully. The first failure has a remedy you can apply immediately. The second does not.

There is a further asymmetry in how the two are encountered. The stops level is met by almost everyone, early, and is quickly learned as a rule of thumb about giving stops room.

The freeze level is met rarely, because it requires price to be sitting against a level you are trying to change. Rarity is exactly why it is misdiagnosed when it does occur.

The Stops Level: How Far a Stop Must Sit From Price

MetaQuotes documentation defines the stops level as the minimal indention, in points, from the current close price at which stop orders may be placed.

In practice it sets a band around the live price. A stop loss, take profit or pending order whose level falls inside that band is not accepted.

The rejection is immediate and total. Nothing is placed, nothing is queued, and no partial version of the order survives. This is worth stressing because it is easy to assume something was recorded.

The reason the limit exists is mechanical rather than punitive. An order sitting arbitrarily close to the market would be triggered by ordinary movement between the moment it is sent and the moment it is registered.

The band moves with price. A level that was comfortably outside it when you planned the trade can be inside it by the time you submit, which is why the same order can be accepted and then rejected minutes later.

Note also what this is not. A rejected order is not a slipped or requoted one. Slippage means you were filled at a worse price; this means you were not filled at all, because nothing was ever placed.

The Freeze Level: When You Cannot Touch an Order at All

The second property is defined by MetaQuotes documentation as the distance, in points, within which trade operations are frozen.

Where the stops level asks whether a level may be set, the freeze level asks whether an order that already exists may be altered while price sits close to it.

Inside that distance, modification is denied. You cannot move the level, and depending on what is frozen you may not be able to remove it either. Both constraints apply just as firmly when attaching a stop after entry, which is the only route left once the order window has been switched off.

The logic is the same as before, applied at the other end. An order about to be triggered cannot safely be edited, because the edit and the trigger would be racing each other.

What makes it different in effect is that it applies to something you are already committed to. The stops level constrains a plan. The freeze level constrains an exit.

It is also, on the evidence of the sources available on this topic, the far less documented of the two. The most thorough treatments of rejected stops give it a single line, and some do not mention it outside code comments.

That imbalance has a cost. A trader who has read only about minimum distances will interpret a denied modification as a platform fault, a connection problem, or a broker acting against them.

None of those is the explanation, and each leads somewhere unproductive. Recognising the behaviour for what it is turns an alarming event into an expected one.

Why This Matters for Closing, Not Just Opening

Almost every discussion of these limits frames them as an order-placement nuisance. That framing understates the second one.

A great deal of risk thinking rests on an assumption that is rarely stated aloud: that a position can be closed on demand. The freeze level is a documented case where that assumption does not hold.

The moment it binds is precisely the moment you are most likely to want out, because it binds when price is near the trigger.

This does not make a stop unreliable. A stop that is already placed still does its work; the constraint is on changing your mind about it, not on its execution.

There is nothing to configure in response. What has to change is an assumption: fix the exit while planning the trade rather than while it runs, since the window for revising it may be shut at the exact moment you reach for it.

It is also a reason to understand the difference between an order type that is attached to a position and one that stands on its own, which our page on the order types themselves sets out.

Where to Read the Actual Numbers for Your Account

Both values are published per symbol, and both are visible from the terminal without writing any code.

They appear in the contract specification for the instrument, alongside the other per-symbol terms such as the tick size and the margin requirement. In MetaTrader this is reached from the symbol list in the Market Watch window.

The specification is the authoritative place to look because these are the values your own broker has set for your own account, which is the only version that governs what you can do.

Check them per instrument rather than once. They are per-symbol properties, so a value read on a major currency pair says nothing about an index, a metal or a thinly traded cross.

It is worth doing before trading an instrument for the first time rather than at the moment an order is refused. The specification takes seconds to open and removes the whole category of surprise.

The same window is where the platform records how positions themselves are accounted for, which our page on how the platform records a position covers.

Why No Article Can Tell You Your Own Distance

Published guidance on this subject is full of specific distances. Figures are quoted as typical, as standard, or as what you should allow.

Every one of those figures is unsourced in the material reviewed for this page, and none of them can be correct in general, because neither value is a platform constant.

Both are set by the broker, per symbol, and either can be set to zero, in which case the restriction simply does not apply on that instrument.

They can also change. A value that held during quiet conditions is not a promise about the same symbol during a volatile session or around a session boundary.

That is why no distance figure appears anywhere on this page, including in the questions below. Any number printed here would be invented rather than sourced, and a reader who trusted it would be worse off than one who read their own specification.

Stops Level Is Not the Stop Out Level

Two similarly named things get confused here, and the confusion sends people looking in entirely the wrong place.

The stops level is a distance in points between an order and the current price. It is about where a level may sit.

The stop out level is a margin threshold expressed as a percentage, at which positions begin to be closed automatically because the account can no longer support them. It is about account equity, and our page on the stop out level deals with it.

They share three letters and nothing else. One is a placement rule for a single order; the other is a solvency rule for the whole account.

The consequences differ just as sharply. Meeting the stops level costs you a resubmission. Reaching the stop out level means positions are being closed for you, without reference to what you intended.

Who This Page Is Not For

This page does not recommend a distance for your stops, and it names no value as safe. Choosing where a stop belongs is a question about the method being traded, not about the minimum the platform will accept.

It is also written for someone reading a specification window rather than writing code. Much of the available material on this subject addresses programmatic order handling, which is a different problem with different remedies.

Finally, the behaviour described here is documented by MetaQuotes for its own platforms. Other trading platforms impose comparable restrictions under their own names and rules, and those should be read from their own documentation rather than assumed to match.

Frequently Asked Questions