Trade & position caps

Caps are limits your automatic orders are sized to fit. Most caps trim an order down to whatever room is left, and skip it only when nothing as large as the minimum order fits. Two caps stop trading outright instead of trimming: max trades per day (once you hit the count, no more orders go out that day) and the drawdown brake (covered on its own page). Orders you place by hand are separate by default. You can opt them in (see below). These caps size and limit the engine’s buys; a risk-reducing exit — a stop-loss, or any position the engine is winding down — is never capped, and always sells the whole position in one order. Risk & Caps exposes the complete set:

The first three rows — Per-trade $, Per-day $, and Max trades per day — are the three order limits (the per-order and per-day limits on automated buys), and they are the ones the Risk caps switch on the Order limits card turns on or off (see Turning the order limits off below). The position, sector, and factor rows, and the drawdown brake, are not order limits: that switch never touches them.

The position and sector caps size buys only — the engine won’t add to a holding or a sector past its cap. It does not automatically sell a position that later grows past its cap through price appreciation; auto-selling on every drift would churn your account against the low-turnover design. Instead, when a holding or sector drifts over its cap, the engine posts an in-app alert so you can decide whether to trim (or leave it to a sell signal, a stop-loss, or sell-to-fund). So a winner that runs well past its cap is flagged, not force-sold.

Not sure what to set? Suggest my caps… on Risk & Caps asks seven questions (how much you could lose in a bad month, how many names to hold, crypto, cash, trading pace, sector concentration, manual orders) and fills suggested limits in as pending changes for you to review; nothing saves until you press Apply changes. On a fresh account it opens by itself the first time you visit. See Guided setup.

Strategies and your caps

Run several strategies at once and each one sizes its orders within its own slice of the account (its allocation), so the caps above bound every strategy’s buys inside its slice and the account-wide ceilings still hold overall. Those account-wide ceilings — the position and sector caps and your sleeve budgets — count everything you hold, positions you bought by hand included, so no strategy can buy the account past them. The allocations card on Settings → Strategies carries one account-wide Strategy-managed risk switch: while it is on (the default), the position caps for each strategy’s slice tighten to match how conservative or aggressive that strategy is — always within, never above, the ceilings you set here; switched off, your Risk & Caps apply as-is to every strategy. A strategy can only ever tighten a cap for its slice, never loosen one.

How the dollar caps scale

The per-trade and per-day dollar caps can scale with your account value (the total worth of your account) instead of staying a fixed number. Scaling is a per-cap toggle: you control it on Risk & Caps under Advanced cap settings, where two switches each default to on:

• Auto-scale the per-trade cap: on, the per-trade cap works out to about 5% of your account value each run; off, the dollar amount you set in Order limits is a flat fixed cap.
• Auto-scale the per-day cap: on, the per-day cap works out to about 20% of your account value each run; off, the dollar amount you set in Order limits is a flat fixed cap.

With a switch on, a bigger account may deploy proportionally more and a smaller account isn’t held to a dollar figure meant for a larger one. The dollar amount shown in Order limits is the upper limit: the scaled cap rises toward it as your account grows and never goes over it. With a switch off, that same dollar amount is simply the flat cap. All cap math is exact to the cent.

Turning the order limits off

On Risk & Caps, the per-trade dollar cap, the per-day dollar cap, and max trades per day live on the Order limits card (its small label reads per-trade and per-day), together with the drawdown de-risk threshold. At the foot of that card sits a switch labeled Risk caps, described as “Turns enforcement of the risk caps above on or off.” It is on by default. Switched off, the engine stops applying those three order limits (the per-order and per-day limits on automated buys): an automated buy is no longer held to a largest-order size, a daily dollar budget, or a daily trade count. That is a big change, and the card says so in a warning that stays in view: “With throttles off, automated buys have no per-order, per-day or daily trade-count limits. A single daily run could invest most of your available cash at once.”

Everything else keeps guarding your account while the switch is off: the position caps, the sector cap, your sleeve budgets, the drawdown brake, your stop-losses, the kill switch, the cash actually on hand, regular market hours, and the minimum order size. Only buys change. Sell-to-fund rotations (selling a weaker holding to make room for a stronger buy) still obey all three limits and still count against the day’s budget and trade count, take-profit trims (the engine selling part of a winner to lock in a gain) are still sized no larger than the per-trade cap, and a risk-reducing sell was never limited in the first place. The hourly crypto safety check never reads the switch at all.

Turning the switch off opens a confirmation titled Turn off risk caps? that repeats the warning, lists what still applies (position caps, sector cap, sleeve budgets, drawdown brake, stop-losses, kill switch), and notes that sells that reduce risk were never throttled and that your saved limits are kept for when you turn risk caps back on. You must tick I understand a single daily run could invest most of my available cash at once. before the Turn off risk caps button enables; Keep risk caps on backs out. Turning the switch back on saves at once with no confirmation. Either way it saves on its own, outside the Review / Apply changes batch the rest of the page uses (the same as the Advanced cap settings switches), and it takes effect from the next daily run.

While the switch is off, the card shows a RISK CAPS OFF chip beside its title and a NOT ENFORCED chip beside each of the three limit rows (not beside Drawdown de-risk, which keeps applying). Your dollar and count values stay saved and editable the whole time, so switching back on restores exactly the limits you had. With the limits off, the order ticket’s “over your cap” warning for hand-placed orders is off too. The flip is recorded in the audit log as a “risk caps updated” entry naming order limits with its old and new value.

When a cap fires

When an auto-execute order runs up against a cap, the engine first tries to trim it down to the room that’s left rather than dropping it. The order is skipped only when even the smallest allowed order won’t fit. Either way the outcome is recorded in the run’s audit detail, and the run’s auto-execute summary reports what was placed and what was skipped. Caps protect in both environments. Paper trimming and skips are how you tune limits before they guard real money.

Manual orders and your caps

Orders you place by hand (from the order ticket, or a holding’s Close button on the Positions page) are, by default, separate from your caps: the dollar caps govern only the automatic engine, so a hand-placed order is never blocked by them. You can change that on Risk & Caps under Advanced cap settings: switch on Orders placed manually included in cap and your hand-placed orders start counting toward the engine’s daily limits.

With that on, three things happen. The money you’ve already bought by hand today is subtracted from the engine’s per-day budget, so your own trades and the engine share one daily limit instead of each getting a full one. Each order you’ve already placed by hand today in the same account (paper or live), sells included, also uses up one of the engine’s max trades per day unless it was cancelled or rejected, so after a busy day of trading by hand the engine may have fewer buys left, or none, while the Risk caps switch is on. And the order ticket shows a warning before you submit a hand-placed order that would go over a cap, naming the order’s dollar size, the cap it crosses, and the setting that counts it (a holding’s Close button doesn’t show this warning). It’s a heads-up, not a block: you can still submit. (Off, the default, there’s no warning and the engine leaves your manual orders out of its daily budget and trade count.) The warning also stays off while the Order limits card’s Risk caps switch is off, since there is then no cap for a hand-placed order to cross.

The ticket always shows an Estimated cost line with the order’s dollar size, and the warning uses the same estimate. Sizing in dollars, that’s the amount you typed (a dollar amount buys the nearest hundredth of a share, so the actual cost can run a few cents under it). Sizing in shares, it’s your quantity at the current price, which the ticket looks up for the symbol you typed; a small chip beside the figure shows how old that price is. If no current price can be found, the line says so and the warning stays silent.