What Happens to Your Stop-Loss When Your Broker Connection Drops: Which Exits Survive at Schwab, Alpaca, Tradier, tastytrade, Kraken and Crypto.com

A stop-loss that lives at the broker keeps working when the connection to your trading software drops. A stop-loss that lives in the software does not; it needs a live connection to send the sell. Which kind you have depends on the broker and on the type of stop. At Schwab and Alpaca, a fixed stop and a take-profit placed as a bracket sit on the broker's own books and fire with or without us. At Tradier they are attached after the fill as a linked pair and then also live at the broker. At tastytrade, E*TRADE, Kraken and Crypto.com, every exit is managed by the software, and a trailing stop is managed by the software at every broker, because trailing stops are not something most broker APIs can hold for you.

That is the whole answer, and it is the thing to check before you trust any automation with an open position. The rest of this page is the detail: why connections drop at all and how long each broker's lasts, exactly what keeps running and what stops when it does, what you see on the dashboard, and what to do about it.

Why a broker connection drops

Every broker hands software a credential with a lifetime. When it runs out, the broker stops answering until a human logs in again. These are the lifetimes as they stand in October 2026, from the integrations we run:

• Charles Schwab: the working token lasts 30 minutes and is renewed automatically; the renewal right itself expires seven days after you log in and cannot be extended. Schwab requires a fresh login every week, by design. Why the seven-day token works the way it does has the mechanics.
• **E*TRADE:** the token expires at midnight US Eastern every day and goes idle after two quiet hours. Idle tokens are revived automatically; the midnight expiry needs a login.
• tastytrade: a 15-minute working token minted on demand from a long-lived one that does not expire. No scheduled login.
• Tradier: account API tokens do not expire on their own; app-based connections use a 24-hour token with a non-expiring renewal. No scheduled login.
• Alpaca: app-based tokens do not expire, and key-based connections do not either. No scheduled login.
• Kraken and Crypto.com Exchange: API keys do not expire. They stop working only if you delete them, change their permissions, or (Kraken) a key is reused in a way that trips its nonce check.

Connections also drop for reasons that are nobody's schedule: you change your broker password, revoke the app from the broker's side, the broker has an outage, or the software itself has a fault. The point of the next section is that a well-built system should not depend on none of those ever happening.

What keeps working when the connection is dead, broker by broker

Two places an exit can live. At the broker: the sell order is resting on the broker's books, so it executes whether or not our software can reach the account. In the platform: our exit monitor watches the price and sends a sell when the level is hit, which it can only do while the connection is alive.

• Schwab: when JorgAI buys, it attaches the take-profit and stop-loss as a linked pair of orders at Schwab, so a fixed stop and a fixed target survive a dead connection. A trailing stop does not; it is managed in the platform. The Schwab setup guide shows where these are set.
• Alpaca: the same. A bracket order places the entry with both exit legs at Alpaca; a trailing stop is platform-managed.
• Tradier: Tradier cannot wrap a market entry in a bracket, so JorgAI places the buy and then attaches a linked take-profit and stop pair at the broker once the fill is in. After that, those two survive a dead connection; a trailing stop does not.
• **tastytrade, E*TRADE, Kraken, Crypto.com:** every exit is platform-managed. A dead connection means no stop, no target and no trailing stop can fire until the connection is back. This is the honest cost of those integrations, and it is why the connection health of these four matters more than the others.

The order-type comparison lists which APIs accept linked exits in one call, which is the same question from the broker's side.

What JorgAI does when it loses the connection

• It tells you, in the app and by email. A connection that stops answering flips a banner on your dashboard, with a one-click reconnect, and sends an email. The email is capped so an idle account is not nagged forever: three unanswered messages, then the banner only. For Schwab, a reminder goes out on day six, before the seven-day limit, so you can reconnect while the connection is still healthy.
• It keeps trying to reconnect on its own where the broker allows it, every 15 minutes for Schwab and every 30 minutes for E*TRADE, so a short hiccup heals without you.
• It never pretends. If a sell cannot be placed, the position stays marked open, because it is open. After three rejected sell attempts the automatic exits for that position pause for 24 hours and you are told, rather than the system hammering the broker or marking the trade closed on the dashboard while the shares are still in your account.
• It does not open anything. No new buys are placed on a dead connection, and the daily caps and loss limits you set still apply the moment it comes back.

What to do about it

• Reconnect on the reminder, not on the failure. For Schwab, treat the day-six email as the real deadline. For E*TRADE, log in each trading morning. For the others, there is no schedule to keep.
• Keep a fixed stop on every position at a bracket broker, even if you also run a trailing stop. The fixed stop is the one that works when nothing else does.
• On the platform-managed brokers, size for the gap. If a position could be unprotected for a weekend, the position size and the daily loss limit are the protection; the stop-loss automation guide covers the arithmetic.
• Check the permissions you granted. A connection that can trade but not withdraw limits what any fault can cost; the API key guide and the safe connection checklist cover that for exchanges and brokers.
• Know where your stop lives before you need it. The settings glossary says, per field, whether a setting is enforced at the broker or in the platform.

Members set their stops, targets, trailing stops, caps and daily loss limit once, and the start page walks through connecting a broker. What this page adds is the part most automation vendors leave out: which of those rules keep running on the day the connection does not.

Quick answers

Does my stop-loss still work if my trading bot disconnects from my broker? Only if the stop was placed at the broker. At Schwab and Alpaca a bracketed stop and target survive; at Tradier the linked pair attached after the fill survives; trailing stops, and every exit at tastytrade, E*TRADE, Kraken and Crypto.com, need a live connection.

How often do I have to reconnect my broker? Schwab every seven days, E*TRADE every trading day (midnight Eastern expiry). Alpaca, Tradier, tastytrade, Kraken and Crypto.com do not expire on a schedule.

What happens to open positions when the connection drops? They stay open at the broker, exactly as they were. Broker-side exits keep working; platform-side exits wait for the reconnect. Nothing is closed or faked on the dashboard.

Will I be told? Yes: a dashboard banner with a reconnect button, an email (capped at three if unanswered), and for Schwab a day-six reminder before the expiry.

Data: token lifetimes and exit placement from JorgAI's broker integrations as of October 26, 2026, and the brokers' developer documentation. Lifetimes are set by each broker and can change; the dashboard banner is the source of truth for your own connection.