How We Protect Your Money

Trading always carries the risk of loss, and nothing on this page changes that. What we can do is limit how much can go wrong at once and stop things automatically before a bad situation compounds. Here's what's actually built in today, in plain language — and, just as importantly, what isn't built in yet.

Automatic circuit breakers

Two independent kill switches watch every live account and can stop new trading on their own, with no one needing to notice and react manually. The first watches your overall account: if realized losses ever pull your account down about a fifth from its peak, every live strategy on that account is retired and nothing new is deployed. The second watches a single trading day on its own — a very bad day can be a serious signal even if it hasn't yet added up to that bigger drawdown, so if realized losses in one day reach around 5% of your account, the same stop kicks in immediately and automatically resets the next trading day.

Position sizing that shrinks in volatile conditions

Not every stock deserves the same size bet — a calm, steady blue-chip and a wild, jumpy small-cap are different kinds of risk even at the same dollar amount. Strategies can opt into sizing that automatically scales a position down the more volatile a stock has recently been, so choppier names get a smaller position rather than the same flat bet as everything else. This control can only ever make a position smaller than the strategy's normal maximum — never larger.

Limits on concentration

A single account is never allowed to pile too much into one place. We cap how many positions can be open across your strategies at once, and we cap how much of your account's value can sit in any one symbol — so two strategies quietly betting on the same hot stock in the same week can't silently double up your exposure to it.

A market-wide pause during broad sell-offs

Most of the controls above react to losses your account has already taken. This one looks outward instead: it watches the broad market for signs of a flash-crash-style event — a sharp multi-day drop in a major index, or a sudden spike in market-wide volatility — and pauses new live positions across every account the moment either shows up, before any individual account's own losses have had time to catch up. Paper accounts keep trading through every condition, since paper trading exists precisely to keep building a track record safely.

Staying clear of earnings surprises

Strategies can opt into a blackout window that avoids opening brand-new positions in a stock right before it reports earnings — one of the most predictable sources of a sudden overnight price gap. This never touches a position that's already open through an earnings date; it only holds off on opening a new one.

Staying inside the Pattern Day Trader rule

US brokerage regulation restricts how many same-day round-trip trades an account under $25,000 in equity can make before being flagged as a "pattern day trader." We track this for every live account and automatically decline a new trade that would risk tripping that flag, rather than letting an account wander into a real regulatory restriction.

A manual kill switch, for the things automatic checks can't see

Every check above is automatic and reacts to numbers — realized losses, volatility, market moves. Some risks don't show up that way at all: a newly discovered bug, a brokerage API behaving strangely, a security incident under investigation. For exactly that gap, an administrator can engage a global kill switch that immediately stops every live account from opening new positions, fleet-wide, without waiting for losses to appear first. Engaging it never affects your ability to close a position you already hold — it can only ever reduce new risk-taking, never trap your capital. Everyone with an active live strategy is emailed the moment it's engaged, so it's never a silent change.

Every strategy proves itself in paper trading first

No strategy reaches your real money without first demonstrating real, sustained performance trading with simulated funds. Signed-in account holders can see exactly how every strategy has performed, anonymized and updated every 30 minutes, on our leaderboard.