algothDocs — Risk & safety
Setting your risk limits
Risk per trade, max position, daily loss, drawdown, portfolio risk, trade count, open positions, notional and leverage — what each limit does and how it's enforced.
Risk limits on AlgoThink are hard caps that block orders when crossed — not suggestions you have to remember to follow. You'll find them under Account → Risk & sizing.
Leave any field blank to keep the platform default, which is shown as the placeholder. Fraction fields take values between 0 and 1 (0.05 = 5%).
The nine limits
- Risk per trade (fraction of equity) — the share of your equity you lose if a new position hits its stop. This is what sizes every position: size = risk ÷ stop distance. The default 0.0075 risks 0.75% of equity per trade.
- Max position (USDT) — a ceiling on any single position's size, regardless of what the risk calculation asks for.
- Max daily loss (fraction) — pauses trading for the rest of the day once you're down this much.
- Max drawdown (fraction) — halts everything, not just for the day, until you review and resume it deliberately.
- Max portfolio at-stop risk (fraction) — caps the combined loss if every open position stopped out at once. This is the limit that stops five "small" trades from adding up to one large one.
- Max trades/day — a hard count.
- Max open positions — how many can be live at once.
- Max total notional (USDT) — total exposure across all open positions, leverage included.
- Max leverage — caps both the per-suggestion recommendation and any manual override you make, up to the platform's own ceiling.
A separate set for autonomous mode
The second tab, Autonomous mode, holds the same nine limits applied only to trades that autonomous mode executes without you. Leave a field blank and it inherits your manual limit; set it to give the automation tighter reins than you give yourself.
Tightening these is the single most useful thing you can do before turning autonomy on.
Trailing stops
Also on this tab: trailing stops, on by default. Once price covers the trigger fraction of the entry-to-target move, the stop locks in part of the gain and the target extends — so winners can keep running instead of being cut at a fixed target. Turn it off if you'd rather have plain fixed brackets.
Suggestion sizing
How the recommended investment on each suggestion is calculated:
- Auto (default) — risks your risk per trade fraction of equity to the stop.
- Fixed — always recommends the same USDT amount.
- Scaled — a percentage of the auto size.
Your max position cap still applies either way, and suggestions that would size under 10 USDT are dropped rather than shown.
What to consider
- Smaller than feels exciting. Risk per trade is the setting most people set too high. At 0.0075 a ten-trade losing streak costs roughly 7% of equity; at 0.05 it costs closer to half.
- Drawdown halt is a feature, not an inconvenience. It exists so a bad week can't quietly become a catastrophic one.
- Limits apply everywhere. Manual approvals, autonomous execution and rebalancing all pass through the same checks — nothing overrides them, including you, mid-trade.