Give Each Automation Its Own Budget

Here’s a question we kept hearing: “I have $10,000 on my exchange. Can I let an automation play with $100 of it and leave the rest alone?”

Until now the honest answer was “sort of”. An automation sized its trades from your whole balance, so your risk settings were really percentages of everything you owned. That’s fine if you run one automation and you trust it completely. It’s less fine when you’re trying out a new idea and would prefer it didn’t get creative with your savings.

So we fixed it. Every automation now has its own budget, and the budget is the law.

How it works

When you create an automation, you tell it how much it can use. We call this its capital. Say you give it $100.

From that moment on, the automation treats that $100 like its own little account:

• Every trade is sized from the $100, never from the rest of your balance. If your risk profile says “risk 2% per trade”, that means 2% of $100, not 2% of $10,000.
• Profits are added to it. If the automation makes $20, it now has $120 to work with.
• Losses come out of it. If it loses $30, it has $70 left.
• It can never lose more than it has. This is the important one, and it gets its own section below.

Your other money stays exactly where it is. Other automations can’t touch this one’s budget, and this one can’t touch theirs.

The hard limit

Plenty of apps say “your risk is limited” and quietly mean “we hope your stop-loss works”. We wanted something firmer than hope.

Every trade an automation opens sets aside part of its capital, and the total set aside can never go above what the automation still has. On top of that, each trade gets a hidden safety line we call a capital stop. If a trade’s loss ever reaches the amount it set aside, it’s closed on the spot, even if your strategy would have held on and even if your own stop-loss somehow didn’t fire.

Put those two rules together and the maths is simple: the automation cannot lose more than the capital you gave it. And if it ever does run its budget down to nothing, it stops itself, closes anything still open, and sends you a notification. No drama, no surprise margin call, no “it seemed like a good idea at 3am”.

Think of it as the difference between telling a teenager “be sensible with money” and handing them a prepaid card.

Several automations, one balance

If you run more than one automation on the same exchange account, their budgets are reserved. When you start an automation, we check that its capital fits in your free balance after the budgets of your other running automations.

So with $10,000 free, you could run one automation with $6,000 and another with $4,000. A third asking for $1,000 would be politely told there’s nothing left, along with exactly how much is free. Nobody double-books the same dollars.

Paper trading works the same way against your paper balance, which is a nice way to rehearse the whole setup before real money is involved.

Changing the budget later

You can top up or reduce an automation’s capital any time, even while it’s running:

• Raising it gives the automation a bigger budget for new trades, as long as the extra fits in your free balance.
• Lowering it works too, but never below what its open trades are currently using. You can’t take back money that’s already in a trade (we checked, the exchange was very firm about it).

Every change is written to the automation’s progress timeline, so there’s always a record of what it was given and when.

What about the automations I already had?

Anything you created before this change keeps running as it was. The next time you start one, we’ll ask you to set its capital first. It takes about five seconds, and you’ll find the “Capital” button on every automation card.

Picking a sensible number

A few rules of thumb:

1. Start small with anything new. A fresh strategy deserves a budget you’d shrug at losing. You can always add more once it has earned it.
2. Leave room for more than one trade. If your automation can hold several positions, give it enough that each one can still meet the exchange’s minimum order size. We ask for at least 10 for exactly this reason.
3. Match it to your risk settings. A 2% risk per trade on $100 is a $2 risk. That’s great for learning, and it will also make very small trades. Decide whether that’s the point.

If you’re not sure where to start, our guide to risk rules in plain English walks through how capital, position size and stop-losses fit together.