Questions buyers ask

These are the questions people ask before they connect a trading account. Each answer links to the page with the full detail. Where we don’t do something yet, we say so.

How are my broker credentials stored and used?

• Your broker password is write-only. No API call returns it, and nobody can read it back.
• It is encrypted at rest. It is decrypted only inside your account’s own terminal, at the moment the terminal logs in.
• It never appears in logs, error messages, audit records or webhooks.
• You can use an investor (read-only) password instead. Then nobody, us included, can trade on the account through Tickwire. The API reports read_only: true and trading_enabled: false.
• When you delete a trading account, its password is deleted at once.
• When a cancelled subscription ends, we keep the passwords for 6 days, so you can come back. Then we delete them, always within 7 days of the end, and email you.

See Security and the privacy policy.

What happens when a terminal restarts?

Terminals can restart: a crash, a host reboot, or a MetaTrader update. Here is what we do.

• Before an order leaves for the broker, we write its idempotency key to disk.
• If the terminal stops after the order left but before the answer came back, the outcome is unknown. We never send that order again, and we never guess that it filled.
• After a restart, health stays disconnected with reconciling: true until we have read positions and orders again. Every restart is gated this way.
• restart_recovery on /health lists each open request, with the positions and orders that match it, so you can check.
• Your account keeps the same machine identity across restarts.
• Creating, rotating or revoking an API key never restarts a terminal.
• Moving an account to your own IP address does restart its terminal, so it waits for your approval.
• Webhook retries survive our restarts. Events still queued inside a terminal when it restarted are lost. After an outage, read positions, orders and history again to catch up.

See Idempotency and Health.

What are the rate limits?

Plain token buckets, with no credit system. The main ones:

• Each key can have 16 requests and 16 trades in flight at once, and 50 open WebSockets.
• Trades have their own budget, so polling never blocks an order.
• A trade refused by a limit gets 429 with sent: false, outcome: not_sent and Retry-After. It never reached the terminal. We never queue it or drop it silently.
• Higher limits are available on request.

See Rate limits.

What if an order’s outcome is unknown?

Sometimes the broker link drops after an order has left. The order may or may not have filled.

• We check the terminal’s positions, orders and deals. If we find the result, the outcome is applied. If we can confirm nothing happened, it is rejected.
• If we can’t tell, we say unknown. We never report success without evidence.
• Don’t retry with a new idempotency key. That is how double positions happen. Read positions, orders and deals first, and match on your own clientId.
• A retry with the same key never places a second order. It returns the same unknown.
• The same key with a different body is refused with 409 idempotency_conflict.
• A duplicate sent while the first call is still running gets 409 idempotency_in_flight.
• Stored results are kept for 24 hours.

See Idempotency and trade outcomes.

How do dedicated IPs work?

• On Starter, it is $14 an account a month for the accounts you put on your own address. The rest stay at $12. You choose per account, and those accounts share one address that is only yours.
• On Pro and Premium, dedicated IPs are included. The free trial uses the shared address.
• An address is never reassigned to another Tickwire customer, and never returned to a pool.
• When you give it up, we cancel it with our hosting provider.
• If a host fails, we may move your IP to a replacement host. That is your IP following your accounts.
• While your accounts are parked, we hold your IP for 30 days.
• We keep a record of who held each address for 24 months after it is cancelled.
• We can’t promise that any broker or prop firm will accept an IP address.

See Pricing and section 10 of the terms.

What uptime do you commit to?

• The service level agreement sets targets, with service credits if we miss them. It does not apply while Tickwire is in public beta.
• It measures two things: API availability, and how long each account’s terminal is connected because of us. Broker outages are counted separately.
• The live figures are on the status page. Each account’s own figure is in the dashboard and the uptime API.
• The SLA covers availability, never trading results.

How do the terms and cancelling work?

• Every new customer gets a 7-day free trial. You save a card, and nothing is charged during the trial.
• You can cancel at any time on the Billing page. Nothing more is charged.
• Your plan runs to the end of the trial or the paid period. Then your accounts are parked: stopped, not deleted. Until then, Resume subscription undoes the cancel.
• If a renewal payment fails, your accounts keep running for 3 days while we retry the card.
• We refund our own billing mistakes, such as a charge after you cancelled or a double charge. We don’t refund a payment because you changed your mind.
• We give at least 30 days’ notice of any price increase.
• Our liability in any 12 months is limited to the fees you paid in those 12 months.

See the terms.

Something not answered here?

Read the FAQ, the security questionnaire answers, or contact us.