When things go wrong: quiet leaders, halts, rejections, and stops

Last updated: 2026-08-25

Copy trading has moving parts: a leader, Bridge, your broker, and the market. This page explains what actually happens in the situations people worry about — so you know what's normal, what Bridge does automatically, and when to act.

"My leader hasn't posted in days"

Leaders are humans. They travel, they sit out choppy weeks, they skip days they don't like. No signal = no trade = no new risk. Bridge does nothing on your account when a leader is quiet — there is no "catch-up" trading and nothing is placed on your behalf without a signal.

What to check:

• The leader's card shows their recent signal history — you can see exactly when they last posted.
• If you hold an open position from an earlier signal, it's still managed the same way it always was: the leader's exits still copy to you (per your execution mode), and any protective stop stays working at your broker whether or not the leader posts again.

When to act: if a leader goes quiet for weeks and you no longer want the exposure, you can close the position yourself from the console or at your broker — Bridge syncs your manual close automatically.

"The market halted / my symbol stopped trading"

Individual stocks can halt (volatility pauses, news pending); the whole market can halt (circuit breakers). During a halt nobody can trade — not you, not the leader, not Bridge.

• Orders sent during a halt sit with your broker until trading resumes or they expire — this is broker/exchange behavior, not a Bridge bug.
• Protective stops don't execute during a halt. When trading resumes, the market may reopen beyond your stop price; the stop then fills at the market it finds. Gap risk through halts is real and no software can remove it.
• Bridge's exit logic keeps retrying failed exits and escalates rather than silently giving up — a stuck exit shows in your notifications rather than disappearing.

"My broker rejected the order"

Rejections happen for reasons on your side of the fence: not enough buying power, options level too low for the contract type, the account flagged for a pattern-day-trading restriction, or the broker briefly degraded.

What Bridge does:

• You get told, loudly. Rejections and skips fire an in-app notification (trade blocked / routing skipped) with the reason. There is no silent failure mode by design.
• Entries fail safe: a rejected entry is simply not opened. You missed the trade; you didn't gain hidden risk.
• Exits fail toward selling: if Bridge can't confirm what your broker holds, it attempts the exit anyway (an uncovered sell is harmlessly rejected; a skipped exit is never acceptable). Exits also retry automatically and escalate toward a market order rather than resting passively while the price runs away.

When to act: if you see repeated trade blocked notifications, check the stated reason — buying power and options approval level are the two most common and both are fixed at your broker, not in Bridge.

"What happens to my stop overnight?"

Options don't trade overnight, but options re-price overnight (time decay + the underlying gapping). A stop placed Monday afternoon can be stale by Tuesday's open. Bridge supports two policies, set per leader:

• Keep GTC (default): your stop rests at the broker overnight, unchanged. Simple, always protected the moment the market opens, but a gap can take you out at the bell at a worse price than the stop level suggests.
• Re-arm at open: just before the close Bridge cancels the resting stop; shortly after the next open it re-places the stop at the same percentage distance re-anchored to fresh opening prices. This avoids stale-stop wipeouts at the bell. Trade-off: the position is unprotected outside market hours — which matters less than it sounds, because options can't trade then anyway; the true gap risk exists at the open under either policy.

If a re-arm ever fails, Bridge alerts you and our ops channel immediately and keeps retrying — a failed re-placement is treated as an incident, not a shrug.

"Something looks wrong right now"

1. Check your notifications — every block, skip, rejection, and fill produces one.
2. Check the positions console against your broker's app. If they disagree for more than a few minutes, tell us.
3. Use Send feedback (bottom of the command menu) or the report a problem flow — feedback pages Jacob's team directly, including nights and weekends.

The honest summary: Bridge is built to fail loud and fail toward protecting you (exits attempt rather than skip; blocks notify rather than vanish). What it cannot do is trade through a halt, override your broker's account restrictions, or remove gap risk. Anyone who tells you their software can is lying to you.