Why an account-level engine
Per-system stops protect one system. The account Risk Engine protects you — it watches your whole book and steps in before a bad day across many systems compounds into a bad month. It is the portfolio-wide safety net that sits above every individual trade.
The five limits
- Daily loss — if your total realized PnL for the day drops below your set amount, it pauses all systems (reversible). Paused systems auto-resume at the next UTC midnight if you allow it.
- Drawdown — if your equity falls from its peak by more than your set percentage, it stops all systems (irreversible by design — a hard floor, not a speed bump).
- Position size — a new system whose deposit exceeds your set percent of total capital is rejected, so no single position dominates the book.
- Correlation — too many active systems on the same pair is rejected, so you don’t unknowingly stack one bet.
- Max active systems — a cap on how many systems run at once, keeping exposure countable.
The gauge and the emergency stop
A gauge shows how much of each limit you are currently using, so risk is visible before it bites. An emergency stop lets you halt everything at once. The point is that protection is something you can see, not a surprise.
In-product example
Set daily loss at, say, $50 and drawdown at 15%. A rough day pauses your systems at −$50 and they resume tomorrow; a deeper slide to −15% from peak stops everything and asks you to reassess deliberately — not in the heat of the moment.
The pitfall
Limits set too loose protect nothing — a 90% drawdown stop is a stop in name only. And remember the drawdown stop is irreversible on purpose: it is meant to force a pause-and-think, not to be tuned away the moment it fires. Set numbers you would actually honor, then let the engine hold the line when emotion would not.
Next
Pair this with per-system protection in the Composer, and see how the deterministic Risk Gate decides whether a system may go live at all.