If you want, you can open trades manually, and then get TS to do the trade management part.

The first thing to do is create the limit or market order. You don't necessarily have to open the order through TS, but it will make things a little simpler.

TS always requires a stop loss, so if you place an order through your broker's platform without one, its details won't be downloaded.

Secondly, because your order was placed through your broker's platform, TS won't know which trading system it belongs to, so it will use the "Unknown" system.

If you use TS to open the order manually, both of these things get taken care of - TS will require that a stop loss is placed, and will also require you to specify the trading system.

Now, once the trade is opened, which will be immediately if using market orders, you download the transactions for that broker to ensure that the new trade is registered in the TS database.

Now go and edit that trade, and set the "Is handled by auto-trading" option. If you opened the trade using the broker's platform, also set the trading system that opened it.

Ensure that the trading system you specified is set to auto-trade. And kick off the auto-trading.

The trading system will see that it has an open trade, and do the trade management.

Something to look out for is the fact that for each trading system, TS can only handle one open Long order *or* trade at the same time, and one open Short order *or* trade at the same (but you can have both a Long and Short). If you create an order manually in the way specified above, and that order breaks this rule for the trading system, TS will have a heart-attack.

The question is then, when the trade that TS is doing the trade management for is closed, how to prevent TS from opening a new order?

There are two ways. First, you could create a Holiday that goes from 01-Jan-2000 to 31-Dec-2999. Attach that Holiday to the trading system, specifying that no new orders are to be placed within the holiday period.

Second, you could create the trading system without any Entry Rules, or with Entry Rules that taken together, could never be true. E.g.:
- Entry Rule - Close Above SMA(20)
- Entry Rule - Close Below SMA(20)