algothDocs — Risk & safety
How arming live trading works
Paper to live on AlgoThink is deliberately several switches: 2FA, exchange keys, mode switch, the Arm button, a fee check and a risk acknowledgment. Here's each one.
Going from paper to a real order is deliberately several switches, not one. Each one is somewhere different, and knowing which is which saves a lot of confusion — the most common one being that switching to live mode does not, by itself, send any orders.
The gates, in order
- Two-factor authentication must be enrolled on your account. See setting up 2FA.
- Exchange API keys saved for the venue you want to trade, with trade permission and withdrawals off. See the connection guide for your exchange.
- No open positions — you can't switch modes mid-trade.
- Mode switch — on Account → General, pick your venue under Trade on and press Switch to LIVE. AlgoThink authenticates against the exchange here; a bad or under-permissioned key is rejected with the exchange's own error.
- Arm live trading — a separate switch in the Risk & controls card on the Dashboard, not on the Account page. Until you arm, live mode is a dry run: intended orders are logged and alerted, nothing is sent.
- Risk acknowledgment — arming asks you to read and accept a risk disclosure once. If the disclosure text is ever updated, you'll be asked again.
- Fee verification — arming fetches your account's real taker fee from the exchange and refuses if it's higher than the cost assumption the strategy validation used. A worse fee tier than the numbers were tested against changes the maths.
The platform operator also has to have live trading enabled at the infrastructure level. If that's off, arming stays unavailable no matter what you do in your account.
How to tell what state you're in
The Dashboard shows a banner and badges:
- PAPER — simulated balance, real prices.
- LIVE DRY-RUN — live mode, not armed. Intended orders are logged and alerted; nothing reaches the exchange.
- LIVE ARMED — real orders go to your exchange, on USDT-margined perpetuals with isolated margin. Exchange-side stop-loss and take-profit attach on entry, with the platform's own bracket monitor as backup.
Turning it off
Disarming is never gated — it's always one click, and so is the kill switch that pauses new signals. Several things also disarm you automatically, by design:
- Disabling 2FA.
- Clearing your exchange API keys.
- Switching venue or trading mode.
- Hitting your max drawdown limit (this halts trading entirely until you review it).
If you remove your keys while live positions are open, those positions stop being monitored for stop-loss and take-profit by the platform. Exchange-side brackets remain, but you should manage them on the exchange directly.
What to consider before arming
- Run dry-run first. Live-but-unarmed shows you exactly which orders would have gone out, with no money involved. It costs nothing but time.
- Set autonomous risk limits before autonomy, not after. See risk limits.
- Start smaller than you think. The platform's default position and notional caps are deliberately low; raise them once you've seen the system behave, not before.
- Live trading can lose money, including your whole balance — through leverage, liquidation, exchange outages or bad markets. No amount of safeguards changes that.