Risk disclosure

01The short version

Trading carries a substantial risk of loss. Most people who trade actively lose money, and automation does not change that statistic — it changes how quickly and how consistently your decisions are executed, which cuts in both directions.

Only trade capital you can lose entirely without it affecting your life. If losing it would change your housing, your health or your obligations to other people, it is not capital for this.

02What automation actually changes

It removes hesitation, fatigue and the temptation to abandon a plan mid-trade. It enforces position sizing and loss limits without negotiation. It keeps a complete record you can learn from.

It does not create an edge that was not there. A strategy with negative expectancy loses money faster when automated, not slower — the same flawed decision, made more often, with less friction between it and the market.

03What automation does not change

• Market risk. Prices move against positions, sometimes far and fast, and no system prevents that.
• Gap risk. A stop is an instruction, not a guarantee. A market that gaps through your stop fills you on the other side of it, and the loss can exceed what you sized for.
• Liquidity risk. Thin books mean worse fills than the model assumed, and in stress the book you sized against may not be the book you trade into.
• Leverage. Borrowing amplifies both directions. Liquidation is a real outcome, not a theoretical one, and it can happen faster than any human or system reaction time.
• Counterparty risk. Exchanges have failed, frozen withdrawals and been hacked. Capital at a venue is exposed to that venue.

04Failure modes that belong to automation

These are the risks a generic disclosure will not mention, and they are the ones worth understanding before you enable live trading.

• Overfitting. A strategy tuned until it looks excellent on history has usually been tuned to that history. The Strategy Lab reports the whole parameter surface rather than the best cell precisely because a peak surrounded by cliffs should look like one.
• Regime change. Conditions that produced an edge stop. A system does not notice it has become obsolete; it keeps executing with the same confidence.
• Correlated positions. Several trades that look independent can be one position wearing different tickers, and discover it simultaneously.
• Connectivity and venue failure. A dropped connection mid-position, a rejected order, an exchange in maintenance. Protective orders are placed at the venue precisely so a disconnect is not an unprotected position, but a venue outage is still an outage.
• Misconfiguration. A risk budget entered as 5% instead of 0.5% behaves exactly as instructed. The system enforces the limits you set, including the wrong ones.
• Silent degradation. A data feed with gaps, a strategy trading conditions it was never meant to see. Gap detection and regime allowlists exist to catch this, and they are mitigations rather than guarantees.

05About the figures on this site

Backtests are hypothetical. They benefit from knowing the period they run over, and no backtest reproduces the experience of holding a losing position with real money in it.

Simulated results shown across this site — the terminal, the charts, the sample decisions — are generated locally for illustration. They represent no account and are labelled where they appear.

Past performance, whether real or simulated, does not indicate future results. That sentence is a cliché because it keeps being true.

06What remains yours

You choose the strategies, the risk budget, the venues and the capital. The system executes within those bounds — it does not decide whether those bounds were wise.

Automation reduces the work of trading. It does not transfer the responsibility for it. Positions opened by software are your positions, and losses taken by software are your losses.

Start in paper mode. It uses the live feed and the full decision path with simulated fills, and it costs nothing to find out that a strategy you believed in does not work.

07This is not advice

Nothing on this site or produced by this software is investment, financial, legal or tax advice, and nothing is a recommendation to buy or sell any instrument.

Whether trading is appropriate for you depends on your finances, your obligations and your tolerance for loss. That assessment comes from a licensed professional who knows your circumstances. It does not come from a piece of software, and it does not come from us.

08If you are not sure

Do not enable live trading. There is no cost to staying in paper mode, and the record it produces is identical to the live one — you can find out how a strategy behaves across a full month of real conditions without a dollar at risk.

If trading is affecting your sleep, your finances or your relationships, that is a signal to stop rather than to optimise. Support for problem trading and gambling exists in most countries and is worth using.