Stop Level

A stop level is the minimum distance from the current market price at which a broker will accept a stop-loss, take-profit or pending order on a given instrument, published in points in the contract specification. Place an order inside that distance and the platform rejects it outright — on MetaTrader with an "invalid stops" error — rather than accepting it and filling it late. It exists because a broker will not undertake to react to a trigger set closer to the price than its own quoting and routing can reliably handle. It is frequently zero on liquid majors and raised on exotics, thin instruments and around news. The practical consequence is that a strategy built on very tight stops can be untradeable at one broker and perfectly fine at another, so the figure belongs in the comparison before the strategy is written rather than in a rejected order afterwards. A stop level of zero in normal conditions may still be widened dynamically, which makes the terms worth reading alongside the current number.