TradeStation says I'm not authorized to run an indicator but it's running on some of my other charts. Why?

If you're using TradeStation and you get a "not authorized" error that prevents and indicator from running on a chart, there are some things you can double-check, and one thing that may be causing the error even if everything's set correctly.

First, double check the common causes for the problem - most of which would prevent the indicator from running on any of your charts (e.g. that you registered your customer number, and used your customer number, not an account number).

The main hint that something else is going on is when it's running on one chart but not on another, or you may even see a web browser popup with a cryptic website reference, such as what's shown in the follow image:

When this occurs, it may be that Microsoft OneDrive is creating a problem for you.  OneDrive, by default, is set to backup all the files in your Documents folder and place them on the OneDrive cloud.  TradeStation stores some of your files in the Documents folder, and updates them as you use the program.  If both TradeStation and OneDrive try to access the same file at the same time, it can create conflicts that may cause this type of error. This is why it may work on one chart and not another, and it may be inconsistently working / failing.

To avoid this problem, you can either turn off OneDrive's backing up of your Documents folder, or you can temporarily pause OneDrive for a number of hours while you use TradeStation.  To do so, open OneDrive's popup menu by clicking on its taskbar icon (shaped like a cloud) and select one of the pause options.  You are offered to pause syncing for 2 hours, 8  hours, etc.  You'll probably want to choose at least 8 hours as you don't want it reenabling the syncing until after you're done trading.  Once you pause OneDrive, it will hold off on backing up your files to the cloud, so don't expect it to be syncing at that time.  However, clicking to get the same menu when OneDrive's paused will bring up an option to unpause it and back up everything immediately.    If you don't want to have OneDrive running at all, you can uncheck its Start with windows setting.  If you want to pause it only while using TradeStation, you can pause it, run TradeStation until you're done with it, then close TradeStation, and unpause OneDrive.  Pausing it for 8 hours may work best, as this way, assuming you don't trade for 8 hours, it will restart and resync automatically, or at least at the start of the next day when you restart your computer until you pause it again.

One thing to keep in mind with OneDrive is that it may also be slowing access to files, since by default, it keeps files on a network server (its cloud), and only pulls the file down to your system via the internet when you request it.  As you can image, there's more overhead and time required to pull the file from the web each time you want to use it, especially for a program that's constantly referencing those files.  If you'd like to have local copies of your files on your system rather than having to go to the cloud each time their accessed, you can uncheck a setting within OneDrive that keeps the files locally stored as well as on the cloud.  While this won't prevent the problem with OneDrive accessing a file at the same time as another program, it should help a bit with performance.  To do this, open OneDrive settings (e.g. by right-clicking on its cloud-shaped icon in the task bar), choose Settings, and uncheck the option to Save space and download files as you use them as shown as the last option under the Settings tab in the image, below.