These are the rules I built into the bot for my own account. They keep a bad day from becoming a catastrophic one.
Trading stops if the day's losses cross 2%. The bot picks up again tomorrow. This is the guardrail working.
Every strategy runs with pretend money for 60 days on the account before any real money moves.
No single position is ever more than 5% of the account. One bad trade can't blow up the whole thing.
Pause from any screen. The bot stops within seconds. No questions asked.
The bot never holds funds. Cash sits in your account at Alpaca — same as if you traded it yourself.
Bot starts with view-only access. You explicitly grant trading permission — and revoke it the same way.