The risk plan carries entry, stop, two targets, reward-to-risk, position size, dollar risk, and two budget lines: what this trade would consume of your daily loss cap, and what today’s realised losses have already consumed. Size is the output of the arithmetic, never an input to it.
The sizing arithmetic
Dollar risk is your account size multiplied by your risk percentage. Position size is that figure divided by the per-unit risk — the distance from entry to stop, multiplied by the contract or lot size.
Size is therefore derived, never chosen. This is the single most consequential design decision in the risk engine: a trader who picks a size first and a stop second has decided how much to lose by accident.
Stocks size in whole units. Crypto and FX size fractionally, carried to enough significant figures to be placeable without pretending to a precision the instrument does not have.
The two budget lines
One line states this trade's dollar risk as a share of your daily loss cap. The other states what today's realised losses have already spent of it.
Both appear on the Take ticket before the commitment rather than after it. A budget consequence disclosed after the decision is a receipt, not a control.
Entry zones
Some patterns describe a place rather than a price — an order block, an imbalance, a swept pocket, a broken level, a pullback lane. For those, a zone is derived and displayed alongside the entry.
Displaying a zone is not the same as entering at it. In most cells the entry remains the analyzed close, and the zone is shown for honesty about where the pattern would rather enter. The separate article on zone entries covers the cells where the ticket actually defaults to a resting limit.
Where the risk block is absent
The signed-out demo renders the verdict without any of this, because every figure here depends on an account size and a risk percentage that an anonymous visitor has never supplied. Inventing one to fill the block would produce a position size for an account that does not exist.
Frequently asked
- What are the two daily-budget lines on the Take ticket?
- One is this trade’s dollar risk as a share of your daily loss cap; the other is what today’s realised losses have already consumed of it. Both are stated before you commit, so the consequence is priced while there is still a decision to make.
- Can I set the position size directly instead?
- You can override it on the Take ticket, and doing so re-derives the dollar risk so the two figures cannot tell different stories. What the engine will not do is treat size as the starting input, because that decides the loss by accident.
Updated Sep 1, 2026