Risk Controls Overview

Risk controls are limits the platform enforces independently of a strategy’s logic. Most of them belong to a bot instance, in Settings → Instance Configuration, so a paper instance and a live instance can use exactly the same rules. Several are off by default: review them before you trade, and practice with them in Paper mode first.

Circuit breaker and daily loss limits

Safety tab, section Circuit Breaker (off until you turn on Enable Circuit Breaker):

• Daily Loss Limit (%) (default 2%) and Daily Loss Limit ($)
• Max Consecutive Losses

When the breaker trips, the instance stops opening new trades for the rest of the day. Reset it from the instance’s Safety settings.

Exits

Trading tab: Stop Loss (%) (default 10%) and Take Profit (%) (default 20%), plus the exit engine’s Max Hold (minutes), Trailing Stop / Break-even, Protect Winner and related exits.

Position sizing

Position Sizing tab: choose a Sizing model (fixed, risk-fraction, volatility-target or capped Kelly), and cap it with Risk % per trade, Max position % of equity and Max shares (absolute). The Trading tab adds Amount Per Trade ($) and Free Cash Usage (%).

Crypto, Webull and Polymarket limits

• Crypto Risk Controls: Max Portfolio in Crypto (%), Max Exposure per Asset ($), Max Open Crypto Positions, Max Bid/Ask Spread (%) and a re-entry cooldown.
• Webull and Polymarket have their own per-order and per-position dollar caps in Settings → Global Configuration. Set them: a blank cap means no cap.

Portfolio-wide limits

The Portfolio page (Portfolio Risk Console) pushes global limits to every instance: Max per-symbol exposure (% combined equity), Max combined daily loss ($) and Max combined drawdown (%).

Trading guards

• PDT & Compliance Guards: a Pattern Day Trader guard, a wash-sale re-entry guard, and a settled-funds guard for cash accounts
• An event-risk guard around scheduled market events
• A re-entry cooldown after an exit
• Stale-data protection, which blocks entries on old quotes

The kill switch

The Portfolio page has an Account-level kill switch for admins:

1. Type the phrase HALT ALL INSTANCES into the confirmation box.
2. Optionally tick also flatten every open position. It is off by default.
3. Choose Trip every instance’s circuit breaker.

Every instance’s circuit breaker trips, so automated entries stop for the day. If you ticked flatten, each instance also closes its open positions through its own exit process. Reset each instance from its Safety settings. There is no keyboard shortcut. Try it in Paper mode so you know exactly what it does before you ever need it live.

Note: Risk controls reduce specific failure modes: runaway automation, oversized orders, a bad day. They cannot eliminate market risk. Gaps, halts, broker outages and connectivity failures can produce losses beyond any configured limit. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor.