Skip to content

Pair lock#

A pair lock prevents a strategy from accidentally trading a symbol it wasn't meant to. Two modes.

auto-lock on first trade (default)#

The strategy starts unrestricted. Whatever symbol fires the first webhook becomes the locked pair from then on. The badge on the strategy detail page reads:

  • Auto-lock on first trade — before the first fill.
  • Auto-locked (SYMBOL) — after the first fill.

Best for "set and forget" — you tie your indicator to a chart, the first alert that comes through pins the symbol, and any future drift is rejected.

pick-now#

You choose the symbol up front. Anything else the webhook sends is rejected with pair_lock_mismatch. The badge reads Pick now (SYMBOL).

Best when:

  • The webhook URL might be shared or copied around — you want a hard cap.
  • Your indicator could fire from multiple chart contexts and you want to guarantee a specific symbol.

You can't change the mode after the first trade#

Once a trade has been placed against the strategy, the lock mode is permanent. Create a new strategy if you need different behaviour.

One symbol per user, across all strategies#

Independent of the per-strategy pair lock, there's a user-level invariant:

A user can only have one open position per symbol across all their strategies.

This is enforced by HookTrader because Binance one-way mode combines positions per symbol — having two HookTrader strategies enter BTCUSDT at the same time would result in a single combined position the platform can't safely attribute.

Concretely: if your BTC-long-momentum strategy already has an open BTCUSDT trade, an entry alert from your BTC-mean-reversion strategy is rejected with symbol_already_active. The rejection is logged in the strategy's webhook log.

Common mistakes#

Symptom Likely cause
Alert rejected with pair_lock_mismatch Webhook is locked to a different symbol than your alert sent. Check the badge.
Alert rejected with symbol_already_active Another of your strategies has an open trade on the same symbol.
Auto-lock locked to the wrong symbol First-ever alert came from a different chart context. Create a new strategy (the lock is permanent after first trade).