Risk & Exit Tools
Protections
The guardrails that run before every trade in a strategy: skip duplicate signals, cap slippage, cancel stale orders, and limit position size.
Protections are the guardrails a strategy runs before every trade. In the Companion App they live inside the strategy editor, on the Protections tab. The section header reads “Guardrails that run before every trade” and shows how many are armed — for example “0 of 12 armed”. The total depends on the strategy’s instrument and broker, so the second number varies.
The Cloud Dashboard groups four of these differently. Its Strategy Builder has no single Protections panel, so if you are editing from the web and cannot find a switch, look here:
| Setting | Companion App | Cloud Dashboard |
|---|---|---|
| Smart expiration detection | Protections | Instrument details → Behavior |
| Weekday 0DTE | Protections → Order safety | Instrument details → Behavior |
| Smart price override | Protections | Execution |
| Selling restriction bypass | Protections → Signal rules | Execution |
Everything else on this page is on the Protections tab in the app and in the equivalent builder section on the web. Both write the same strategy, so a switch set in one shows up in the other.
The Protections tab. Each group card shows its armed count (like 0 / 4); expand a card to reach the individual guardrails.
Each guardrail is a single row with an on/off toggle. Turn one on and its number field appears next to it. Turn it off and the field greys out but stays visible, so you can see the value you had set.
The rows are grouped into three cards:
| Group | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Signal rules | Which signals to act on, and which to skip. |
| Order safety | Limits at the moment of placing the order. |
| Position limits | Hard caps on size, adds, and forced exits. |
Which rows show up depends on the strategy’s instrument and broker. A stock strategy on one broker will not show every row a multi-leg options strategy on another broker does. Only guardrails the broker actually enforces are shown.
Signal rules
- Duplicate protection drops a signal that matches a recent trade on this strategy, so the same alert firing twice does not double your position.
- Avoid stacking the same ticker stops you re-entering a name you already hold unless the price has moved far enough from your average cost. Set the distance as a percent.
- Process sell signals honours explicit close, STC, and sell-to-close messages.
- Smart expiration detection picks the next valid expiration when an options signal is vague about the date.
- Smart price override uses live quotes when they are more recent than the price in the signal.
- Selling restriction bypass lets the strategy close positions it did not open itself. Stocks and RSA only.
- Auto position cleanup closes the least healthy holdings once you hold more than a set number at once. Memecoins only.
Order safety
- Slippage cap rejects a fill more than the set percent away from the expected price. Enter the cap as a percent, for example 2.5.
- Cancellation timer cancels an open order that has not filled after the set number of minutes.
- Entry delay waits the set number of seconds after a signal before placing the order.
- Buy limit offset and Sell limit offset nudge limit orders off the price. Each takes a dollar amount or a percent of the price. These only appear when the matching entry or exit method is set to a limit order.
- Buy same-day on the matching weekday buys today (0DTE) when the expiration names a weekday and today is that day. Auto-close 0DTE has the broker flatten those positions a set number of minutes before the close. Both appear only for options and spreads strategies.
If you turn Slippage cap on, set a number. An armed slippage cap with a blank value is a broken state that can cause the broker to reject every trade. Clearing the number turns the guardrail off, which is intentional.
Position limits
- Maximum trade value is a hard dollar cap per trade. The trade aborts if size times price exceeds it.
- Double-down protection controls repeated buys on a name this strategy already holds. See below.
- Block-exit threshold refuses a sell that would lock in a loss bigger than the set percent, so the position can recover or hit your stop instead.
- Minimum profit skips a copy-trade sell alert when its expected profit is below the set percent.
Double-down protection
Turn Double-down protection on and, on brokers that support a cap, a panel opens below the row with two choices:
- Block every add never adds to a position you already hold.
- Add up to a limit keeps adding until a cap, then blocks.
When you pick Add up to a limit, you get the cap field, and — where the broker enforces more than one unit — a Measure the limit by control above it:
| Broker | Measures offered |
|---|---|
| Interactive Brokers, Tradier | Dollar value, Quantity, Number of adds |
| STG / DAS | Dollar value only, so the measure control is hidden and you go straight to the cap |
| Every other broker | No cap at all — see the note below |
On brokers that do not support a cap, Double-down protection is a plain on/off toggle that blocks every add. On brokers that do, switching the measure clears the current cap, since a dollar value read as a share count would be nonsense — and a blank cap fails safe back to blocking every add.
Tips
- The group cards collapse when nothing is armed and open when something is. A vanilla strategy shows three tidy header rows.
- Each row has a help icon. Hover it for a short explanation of what the guardrail does.
- Numbers are shown in friendly units even when they are stored differently. Entry delay is shown in seconds, the cancellation timer in minutes, and the slippage cap as a percent.