Capital protection: brakes fitted BEFORE they are needed

A single position is defended by the SL. A campaign — by limits and the reaction to the reversal. But the account as a whole needs its own layer of defense, working INDEPENDENTLY of signal quality. This set arms four mechanisms:

• Equity Guard (EG) — a trailing stop on the BASKET RESULT. When the combined profit of the open positions reaches EG_Start (5 USD), the guard arms; from then on the result may pull back at most EG_Dist (2.50 USD) from its peak — after that everything is closed. Earned profit stops being “paper”.
• Basket Max Loss (BML) — the basket’s hard floor: a combined loss of 25 USD (2.5% of the deposit) closes everything. This is the safety in case an averaging campaign goes the wrong way.
• Daily P/L Limit (DPL, loss side) — a daily result of −40 USD (4%) disables trading until the end of the day (a hard stop, reset at the day anchor hour). It protects against the most dangerous phenomenon: adding positions after a series of losses.

The thresholds are deliberately pressed down to the scale of a basket with a 0.01 lot — in this lesson the brakes are meant to actually fire, so you see them in action rather than merely knowing they exist. With a larger lot or balance, scale the values proportionally.

• Entry-quality gates — Global_MaxSpread=50 (no entries on a blown spread, e.g. rollover) and FreeOpens_N=3 (from the 4th campaign position on, at least 1 open position must be IN PROFIT — an anti-martingale brake).

What is enabled and why

Feature	Value in the set	Rule
EG_Start_value=5, EG_Dist_value=2.5 (mode: currency)	+5 arms, −2.50 from the peak closes	”what is earned should stay earned”
StopAfterEG_Mode=2, 60 min pause	after EG fires, an hour’s break	the result is booked, emotions cooled
BasketMaxLoss_Mode=0, value=25	a basket loss of 25 USD = close	the floor of the planned loss
DPL_Loss_value=40, action: hard stop	a day at −40 USD = end of trading today	tomorrow is a session too
Global_MaxSpread=50	spread > 50 pts blocks entries	we do not pay to enter at the worst moment
B1_FreeOpens_N=3	the 4th entry only with a position in profit	averaging with your own, not borrowed

The trigger hierarchy: DPL (account, day) → EG/BML (basket, now) → SL/BE/TS (a single position). Each layer has a different horizon.

How it makes price behavior visible

1. The basket result is a chart too. EG treats the profit curve like a price and puts a trailing on it. You will see in practice how the basket’s profit waves — and how often the last wave gives everything back if nobody stops it.
2. The distribution of days. DPL teaches you to look at trading in units of DAYS, not trades: a single bad day is allowed to happen — it is not allowed to drag a whole week with it.
3. Spread as a signal. The MaxSpread gate shows that the market’s microstructure itself (rollover, data releases) can be a filter: when the spread runs away, the entry conditions are bad by definition.

What to watch

• The Equity Guard status line on the EA panel (armed / stop level).
• The [EG], SAFETY and [DPL] entries in the log — each firing with amounts.
• Days ended by DPL — compare with what happened next: how many losses were NOT realized thanks to the hard stop.

Next step

Lesson 10: protection also has a dimension of TIME — when to trade at all and who watches the stops when the VPS goes down. Schedule and server-side stops.