What guards do
Guards are veto conditions: even when your signal fires, a guard can refuse the entry because the market context makes it a bad fill. They protect against the entries that look right and execute wrong.
The main guards
- •Pump protection — block entry during an abnormal price/volume spike, so you don’t buy the top of a vertical candle. Tuned by per-bar price change, wick size and volume spike.
- •Spread protection — don’t enter when the bid-ask spread is too wide or liquidity is low; a slippage guard for thin markets.
- •Flat-only (ADX) — for range strategies, only trade when ADX confirms a flat, not a trend, so a grid isn’t caught in a runaway move.
- •Operational guards — auto-add margin (top up to keep distance from liquidation) and cover-fees (make sure a trade clears its own costs).
In-product example
The pump-guard blocks a long when the last bar jumped several percent on a volume spike — you skip the blow-off top instead of buying it, and wait for the next clean setup.
The pitfall
Guards are protection, not a strategy — they stop bad entries, they never create good ones. And a pump or spread guard set too loose lets through exactly the entries it exists to block; tune each threshold to how the specific pair actually moves, then trust it to say no.
Next
See the full protection picture in Risk & Protection, and the signals these guards sit on top of in Indicators.