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 throttle 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:
| Cap | Limits |
|---|---|
| Per-trade $ | Largest single order: auto-scales to 5% of your account value, up to your set limit |
| Per-day $ | How much the engine buys in one trading day: buys and sell-to-fund rotations draw from it — risk-reducing sells (stop-losses, signal exits, take-profit trims) never do. Auto-scales to 20% of your account value, up to your set limit |
| Max trades per day | Order count in one trading day (buys — risk-reducing sells don’t count) |
| Position cap: equities | The most of the account the engine will buy a single equity position up to |
| Position cap: crypto | The most of the account the engine will buy a single crypto position up to |
| Sector cap | The most of the account the engine will buy into any one sector (stocks only, and applied when the sector is known) |
| Single-factor exposure | A guideline ceiling on how much one factor (momentum, low volatility, value, or quality) drives your mix (it ships at 50%). It is advisory today: you set it on Risk & Caps, but the automatic engine does not yet size orders against it |
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.
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 Throttles 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 Throttles 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 Throttles 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.
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 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 buys start counting toward your per-day cap.
With that on, two 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. 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 and the cap it crosses. It’s a heads-up, not a block: you can still submit. (Off, the default, there’s no warning and the engine ignores your manual buys.)
Sizing in dollars, the warning always shows, using the amount you typed as a close estimate (a dollar amount buys the nearest hundredth of a share, so the actual cost can run a few cents under it). Sizing in shares, the warning needs a recent price to estimate the dollar size, so it shows where a quote is on hand.