Safeguards5 min read

Loss controls: circuit breakers for your strategy

Daily, weekly and drawdown-based stops that pause a strategy before a bad run becomes an unrecoverable one.

Why a strategy needs an off switch

Every rule set has conditions it was not designed for. Loss controls detect that the strategy is behaving outside its expected range and stop it before you find out the expensive way.

Layered limits

A common structure: a daily loss cap that halts trading for the session, a weekly cap that pauses until review, and a peak-to-trough drawdown limit that deactivates the strategy entirely.

Each layer should be meaningfully wider than the one below it, or the lower limit is the only one that ever fires.

Ready to put this into practice?

Set your loss controls now →

Restarting deliberately

Reactivation should require you to look at what happened. A strategy that restarts automatically after hitting its drawdown limit is not really protected.

M

My Metric Trade Editorial

Published 8 August 2025

← All articles

Try it yourself

Start with paper trading — free, no credit card.