What happens to TP and SL with trades when closed.

Pierre Cilliers 0

Just a quick one.

I create a buy with TP and SL trade as follows:

self.buy_bracket(tradeid = key,
            exectype = bt.Order.Market,
            price = close_price,
            size = 0.01,
            limitprice = tp_price,
            stopprice = sl_price)

I understand that a buy_bracket creates 3 x orders:

market order for the entry,
limit order for TP, and a
stop order for SL.

If I, for example, manually close the buy trade by using self.close(), like this:

self.close(tradeid = key, size = 0.01)

what happens to the TP and SL orders in the backtrader backend?

I have decoded and tracked the closing of trades and I can clearly see that the trade gets closed by the following
notify_trade() method:

def notify_trade(self, trade):

     if trade.justopened:
          print(f'New trade {trade.tradeid} opened')
     elif trade.isclosed:
          print(f'Trade {trade.tradeid} recently closed')

Does the TP and SL orders get cancelled automatically or do I have to self.cancel() these corresponding orders when closing the trade?

Pierre Cilliers 0

@emr

Awesome, thanks.
Will refer back if I get an answer. (hoping it closes automatically)

Pierre Cilliers 0

@emr

Sorry for the delayed answer to my question but here it goes:

For buy_bracket orders it generates 3 x orders:

market order for the entry,
limit order for TP, and a
stop order for SL.

The market order is triggered at market price, therefore becomes an active trade (can track this in notify_trade()). You can successfully close this position by pointing to the specific tradeid with

self.close(tradeid = key, size = 0.01)

I can confirm that the remaining 1. limit order for TP and 2. stop order for SL are still dangling in backtrader backend. These need to be removed if you close the market order otherwise they will be triggered at their limit price at a later stage.

The manner in which I did this is tracking your orders in a self.buy_trade dictionary.
For example, I populate this dictionary like this

self.buy_trade[key] = self.buy_bracket(tradeid = key,
                                       exectype = bt.Order.Market,
                                       price = close_price,
                                       size = 0.01,
                                       limitprice = tp_price,
                                       stopprice = sl_price)

This self.buy_trade[key] dictionary contains three backtrader object, representing the market order, stop order and limit order, respectively.

You can track these limit and stop orders manually and delete them as follows:

self.cancel(self.buy_trade[key][1]) # cancelling SL order
self.cancel(self.buy_trade[key][2]) # cancelling TP order

Therefore if you want to delete an active trade, it might look like this:

self.close(tradeid = key, size = 0.01)
self.cancel(self.buy_trade[key][1]) # cancelling SL order
self.cancel(self.buy_trade[key][2]) # cancelling TP order

where key points to the tradeid when creating the order.