Circuit breakers and portfolio risk controls

Circuit breakers are hard stops that halt trading when conditions indicate the system or market is in a state where continued trading is likely to destroy capital. They are not soft warnings — they unconditionally block new position opens, and some permanently halt the trader until a manually initiated restart.

Circuit breaker state (except daily drawdown reset) persists for the duration of the current process. If the halted flag is set, the only way to resume trading is to restart the process with a funded wallet and a clear understanding of what triggered the halt.

Active circuit breakers

Minimum balance
Daily drawdown
Consecutive losses

if balance < 0.08 SOL → halt permanently

If available balance drops below 0.08 SOL, the trader sets halted = true and opens no further positions for the remainder of the session. This is a permanent halt within the current process — it requires a manual restart.The 0.08 SOL threshold is intentionally set above the Jito tip cost of 0.0002 SOL per trade round-trip. This ensures there is always enough SOL to execute a sell transaction even if the trader has somehow entered a position it shouldn’t have.

Position sizing accounts for the minimum balance reserve directly: size = min(size, balance - 0.08). This means positions shrink naturally as the balance approaches the floor, rather than halting abruptly at the threshold.

equity = available_balance + total_open_position_sol
drawdown = (day_start_equity - equity) / day_start_equity

if drawdown ≥ 30% → halt for the day

If total portfolio equity (available SOL plus deployed SOL in open positions) drops 30% from the day’s starting value, trading halts until midnight UTC. This is a soft halt — it resets automatically via a daily reset timer.Critically, the drawdown calculation uses total equity, not just available balance. Opening positions does not itself trigger drawdown — if you deploy 0.5 SOL into a position, that 0.5 SOL remains counted as equity. Drawdown increases only when deployed capital actually loses value.This distinction matters: a trader that deploys most of its capital into open positions will not trigger a drawdown halt unless those positions decline in value.

if consecutive_losses ≥ 5 → cooldown for 15 minutes
consecutive_losses resets to 0 after any winning trade

Five consecutive losing trades triggers a 15-minute cooldown. This is the softest circuit breaker — trading resumes automatically after the cooldown expires without any manual intervention.The consecutive loss counter resets after any winning trade, not just after the cooldown period ends. This means a sequence of four losses followed by a win resets the counter to zero, not four.The rationale: five consecutive losses may indicate that signal quality has temporarily degraded — for example, a rapid market regime shift that the detector hasn’t yet classified, or models encountering a distribution they weren’t trained on. A brief pause is preferable to continuing to trade into worsening conditions.

Anti-signal force exits

Anti-signals are not technically circuit breakers — they don’t block new trades — but they function similarly in terms of protecting capital. When an anti_signal arrives for a token with an open position, the position is force-exited immediately regardless of current price, profit, or hold time. This can mean exiting a profitable position early if adversarial conditions are detected after entry. The cost of leaving profit on the table is considered far smaller than the risk of holding through a coordinated dump.

Anti-signals are generated by the AntiSignalEmitter service and published on the same trade:signals Redis channel as buy signals. They carry a severity field (count of risk triggers that fired, minimum 2) and a human-readable reasons array.

Interaction with position sizing

The circuit breaker minimum balance is factored directly into position sizing:

size = min(size, balance - 0.08)

This means a trader at 0.12 SOL will size at most 0.04 SOL into a new position. As the balance approaches the 0.08 SOL floor, positions become progressively smaller until the minimum position size check (min_position = 0.05 SOL) causes trades to be skipped entirely, well before the hard halt triggers.

State persistence

State	Persistence	Reset
`halted` (minimum balance)	In-memory, session only	Manual process restart
Daily drawdown halt	In-memory, session only	Midnight UTC (daily reset timer)
Consecutive loss cooldown	In-memory, session only	Automatic after 15 minutes

All circuit breaker state is in-memory only and resets on process restart. This is intentional — a restart is a deliberate human action that implicitly acknowledges the halt condition and provides an opportunity to assess what caused it before resuming.

Monitoring circuit breaker status

The most direct way to see whether a circuit breaker has fired is to check the logs — the trader emits a warning with the specific reason every time a circuit breaker blocks a trade. For a database view of recent performance, use these queries:

SELECT
  current_balance,
  total_pnl,
  total_trades,
  total_wins,
  ROUND(total_wins::numeric / NULLIF(total_trades, 0) * 100, 1) AS win_rate_pct
FROM live_portfolio
WHERE is_active = TRUE;

A trader that has halted due to minimum balance will show no recently closed trades and no open positions. A consecutive loss cooldown will show a run of recent closed trades all with negative P&L.

Monitoring

Full reference for PostgreSQL tables, pipeline stats, and key log patterns.

Strategies

How position sizing interacts with phase gating and the minimum balance reserve.

Getting Started

The Pipeline

Intelligence

ML System

Live Trader

Circuit breakers and portfolio risk controls

Active circuit breakers

Anti-signal force exits

Interaction with position sizing

State persistence

Monitoring circuit breaker status

Monitoring

Strategies

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Getting Started

The Pipeline

Intelligence

ML System

Live Trader

Documentation Index

​Active circuit breakers

​Anti-signal force exits

​Interaction with position sizing

​State persistence

​Monitoring circuit breaker status

Monitoring

Strategies

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Active circuit breakers

Anti-signal force exits

Interaction with position sizing

State persistence

Monitoring circuit breaker status