my kill switch rules for perps, curious how others do it
ok so this is less a question and more me putting my process on paper because writing it down keeps me honest.
background: i trade perps, mostly majors, sometimes i wander into stuff i shouldn't. degen but not stupid, or at least that's the plan. the thing that took me the longest to accept is that my worst damage never came from a bad entry. it came from me being awake at 3am adding to something that was already going against me and telling myself it was "scaling in".
so now i have hard rules that live outside my brain:
- max 3 open positions. not because 3 is magic, but because 4 is where i stop actually watching them.
- every position gets a stop attached at entry. not "mental", not "i'll set it after". attached. if the api chokes on the bracket i close the position and re-enter, i don't just sit there naked.
- daily loss cap. hit it and i'm flat and logged out for the rest of the day. i actually have a little script that checks realized pnl on a timer and screams at me. i've thought about making it auto-flatten but honestly i don't trust myself to code that correctly enough to give it that power.
- funding is part of the trade thesis. if i'm paying to hold a directional position for days, that has to be in the math up front. i used to treat it as a rounding error and it very much is not on longer holds.
the part i'm still bad at: reduce-only vs regular orders. i've fat-fingered a "close" that turned into a flip more than once because i was in a hurry on mobile. now i try to only manage size from one interface, but sometimes i'm not at my desk.
other thing i've been thinking about is what happens when connectivity dies mid-position. exchange stops sitting server-side cover most of it, but if i'm running any kind of local logic on top, that logic just... stops. i've started assuming any local script can vanish at any moment and asking myself if the position is still survivable if that happens. usually the answer is "yes but smaller size".
anyway. what's in everyone else's hard-rules list? specifically curious about people who trade overnight or across sessions, because that's where mine feel thinnest.
