A stop loss protects a single trade. Risk Guard protects the account. It sits in front of every order — live and paper alike — and blocks it if letting it through would breach a limit you have set, so one bad strategy, or one bad day, cannot run away with your capital.
Set it up before you go live. It is the difference between a bad afternoon and a blown account.
Four checks before every trade#
Every order runs this gauntlet first. Fail any one check and the order is blocked and logged, not placed.
The four limits#
Each check maps to a limit you configure, with a sensible default.
| Limit | Default | What it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Max daily loss (USD) | $500 | New trades are blocked once the day's realized loss hits this, until the next day or a manual reset. |
| Cooldown after a loss | 5 minutes | A pause after a losing trade before anything new can open — a brake on revenge trading. |
| Max open positions | 100 | The most positions you can hold at once across every exchange — a cap on total exposure. |
| Max position size | 99% | The most of a venue's capital a single position may use. |
All four apply across every venue at once — Risk Guard is an account-level brake, not a per-strategy one.
Two books, two guards#
Paper and live are separate books, and each gets its own independent guard: its own four limits, its own daily state, its own trip. The Risk Guard view has a Live | Paper selector at the top, and everything below it — the limits form, the progress bars, the reset button — belongs to the book you selected.
The split is what makes both books honest. Paper positions no longer consume the live book's open-position budget, and a rough day on paper cannot spend the live daily-loss cap — or the other way around. A tripped paper guard blocks new paper entries only; the live book keeps trading, and vice versa.
Manual trades and automated ones share the same book budgets — the guard does not care whose finger was on the button.
When it trips#
The guard trips when the book's realized daily loss reaches its cap, or its open positions reach their cap. From that moment, new entries on that book are blocked — closes always go through — and a banner on the Risk Guard view says which cap did it. You are told once, the moment it happens: an in-app notification per book ("Live risk guard tripped" / "Paper risk guard tripped") that deep-links back to this view, and optionally the same message on Telegram — both configurable per book in the Notifications card of the guard's settings.
A daily-loss trip clears on its own at the UTC day rollover, when the day's totals reset; there is no manual un-trip. A position-cap trip clears as soon as positions close back below the cap. The post-loss cooldown is gentler than a trip — it pauses new entries for the configured seconds after a losing trade, without a banner or an alert.
Watching it#
The Risk Guard view shows where the selected book stands today: a progress bar toward its daily loss limit, open positions versus the maximum, fees and trade count for the day. It is the dashboard for "how much room do I have left before the brake engages" — and the dashboard proper carries a matching pair of status tiles, Risk · Live and Risk · Paper, each reading OK or TRIPPED.
If a cooldown is holding you back and you want to override it, Reset Cooldown clears the timer for that book without touching its daily loss tracking. The day's loss total resets on its own at midnight UTC.
Start conservative — a $100 daily loss cap and a handful of max positions — and widen the limits only as live performance earns your confidence. It is far easier to loosen a brake than to recover from not having one.