Position Management
Position management covers what happens to a trade after it opens. Four independent protections let you decide how the agent defends an open position.
Everything starts disabled. The agent never modifies an open trade unless you've explicitly told it how.
The Four Protections
| Protection | Driven By | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| Break-Even | How far in profit you are | Moves the stop to your entry (plus an optional buffer) once the trade reaches a configured profit threshold. Fires once per trade. |
| Trailing Stop | The trade's peak | Ratchets the stop up as price hits new highs (long) or new lows (short). Fixed-percent or volatility-adaptive. |
| Time-Decay Stop | How long the trade has been open | Tightens the stop on a schedule if the position stalls below a profit threshold. |
| Take-Profit Ladder | Profit milestones | Closes part of the position at each milestone. Up to ten rungs. |
Why Four Separate Protections?
Each protection answers a different question:
- Break-Even — "How do I make sure a winner never becomes a loser?"
- Trailing Stop — "How do I capture an extended run without surrendering it on a pullback?"
- Time-Decay — "What do I do with a trade that's gone nowhere for an hour?"
- Take-Profit Ladder — "How do I bank profit in pieces instead of guessing the top?"
Layer them in whatever combination matches your strategy. Disabling any one of them has no effect on the others.
Break-Even
The simplest protection. Once the trade is profitable enough, the stop snaps to your entry — with an optional buffer so you lock in a tiny gain instead of break-even flat.
Typical settings: trigger at +3% profit, with a +0.1% buffer above entry on a long. Once it fires, the trade can no longer become a loss.
It fires once per trade. Stops only ever improve — if your current stop is already better than the break-even target, nothing changes.
Trailing Stop
Follows the trade's peak. When price reaches a new high (on a long) or a new low (on a short), the stop ratchets up behind it.
Start condition — when the trail begins:
| Condition | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Immediately | Trail runs from the moment the trade opens. |
| After Break-Even | Trail starts only after Break-Even Protection has fired. |
| After First Profit Ladder Rung | Trail starts only after the first take-profit milestone closes. |
Trail style:
- Fixed percent — the stop stays a fixed percent behind the peak.
- Volatility-adaptive — the stop stays a configured distance behind current price, scaled by market volatility. Adapts to live conditions. If volatility data is briefly unavailable, that cycle skips safely and the trail resumes the next one.
A spike-and-crash can't drag your stop backward. Stops only ever improve.
Time-Decay Stop
The "we've been here too long" protection. Useful for cutting trades that aren't going anywhere.
Three conditions must all be true before it acts:
- Grace period has elapsed since the trade opened.
- Profit is below your stale threshold (the position isn't moving).
- Interval has elapsed since the last tightening.
When all three line up, the stop tightens by a configurable percent of the gap between your current stop and current price. A max tighten cap limits how far time-decay can move the stop in total.
| Knob | Typical Default | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Grace period | 60 minutes | How long before time-decay is even considered. |
| Interval | 15 minutes | Time between successive tightenings. |
| Tighten per step | 5% | How much of the gap to close each step. |
| Max total tighten | 50% | Hard cap on total stop movement. |
| Stale threshold | 1% profit | Below this, the position counts as stalled. |
Time-decay and trailing complement each other: trailing reacts to price, time-decay reacts to time. Both refuse to worsen the stop.
Grace period must be at least as long as the interval — the system enforces this when you save.
Take-Profit Ladder
Up to ten rungs. Each rung has:
- Trigger — the profit threshold that fires it.
- Close percent — how much of the original position to close when it fires.
When profit crosses an un-triggered rung, the agent submits a reduce-only order for that rung's close percent. The ladder then waits for the next rung above.
Rules:
- Rungs are strictly increasing in trigger. Lower rungs always fire first.
- Total close percent across all rungs must stay under 100. The agent always keeps at least a sliver of the position running so the trade can capture an extended move.
A common ladder: 30% at +5%, 30% at +10%, 30% at +20%, leaving 10% as a runner.
Order of Operations
When multiple protections are active, the agent runs them in a fixed sequence on every check cycle:
- Break-Even first — so the trailing stop's "after break-even" gate can see the update on the same cycle.
- Trailing Stop second — so time-decay can see any trailing improvement before deciding whether to tighten further.
- Time-Decay Stop third — so the stop only tightens if trailing hasn't already improved past the decay target.
- Take-Profit Ladder last — so any stop improvements above are already in place before a partial close fires.
Every stop change goes through three steps: amend on the exchange, update the agent's internal state, write the audit record. If any step fails, the cycle retries on the next pass without leaving the trade half-changed.
Safety Guarantees
- Stops only ever improve. Every protection refuses to move the stop in the wrong direction. Trailing won't pull back. Time-decay won't widen. Break-even won't downgrade.
- Grace periods. Every protection has opt-in gates that prevent surprise behavior. Time-decay won't act inside its grace period. Trailing waits for its configured start condition.
- Composable. Disabling any one protection has zero effect on the others. Turn trailing off tomorrow and your profit ladder keeps working.
When Not to Use Position Management
- Very short trades. If your agent only holds for a few minutes, post-entry management often fires too late to matter.
- Manual override flows. If you're actively managing the trade by hand, turn position management off so the agent's check cycle doesn't conflict with your edits.
- Strategy evaluation. When you're testing a new strategy, leave protections off so you can see raw entry-and-exit performance without the safety layer skewing the results.
A safe starting point: enable Break-Even at +3% with a +0.1% buffer. Once you trust how that behaves, layer on a Take-Profit Ladder. Add trailing and time-decay only after you've watched the first two protect real trades.