Discussion Forum

I have no idea what the problem is, but I can guarantee that people are going to lose a ton of money on stop loss orders over the next 4 years.

When you place a limit order (your profit target) it reduces your buying power. You can't also then place a stop order because that reduces your buying power too. The 2 orders create a position that you don't have enough margin for.

What you need is an OCO (one-cancels-other) order, where you have a profit target limit and a stop market order. If one is hit, the other one is automatically canceled. It won't require as much margin so you shouldn't have this error. 

That's my experience from using other automated trading APIs, but not sure if there is something else hapepning with QC Here.

In your code, you were submitting a StopMarket and a Limit order right after you submitted a MarketOrder. When you submit an order, the algorithm checks for buying power and, if the first order (buy market) was filled, it should always have buying power to sell. 

I modified and simplified your code to be sure it only submits the sell orders after the buy market order is filled. Also, it now uses Transactions.CancelOpenOrders method to cancel the sell orders that are never filled. Previously we got two open orders when it liquidates the holding before market closes. With these modifications, we do not need to keep tracking of the order tickets (CurrentOrder, StopLossOrder, ProfitTakeOrder) and we can all use SetHoldings helper to buy the security.

Thanks a lot, Alexl