- How often
- Once, then revisited only when your circumstances change rather than when you feel like it.
- How long
- Twenty minutes of honest arithmetic.
- What it prevents
- Nothing. It caps what any single failure costs, which is a different and more achievable goal.
- If you skip it
- Limits get set in the moment, by whoever is talking to you, which is the worst time and the worst author.
- How you notice you stopped
- The numbers drift upward without you deciding anything. That drift is the failure.
The three numbers
| Limit | How to set it |
|---|---|
| Order size | What you could lose entirely without it mattering. Not what you can afford, what you can shrug at. |
| Balance ceiling | What you are about to spend, and nothing beyond it. A balance sits outside every protection here. |
| Total exposure | Everything committed plus everything parked, at any one moment. Worth writing down as one number. |
Why this one is differentThese are the only variables entirely under your control. Everything else on this site reduces how often something goes wrong. This page reduces what it costs when it does.
The exit plan
Decide now what stopping looks like, because almost nobody decides it later. People drift, which leaves a live account, a balance and a set of saved addresses behind, and an abandoned account with standing is worth something to somebody else.
Stopping properly means closing out anything open, withdrawing in full, changing the password to something random you do not keep, deleting saved addresses rather than archiving them, and clearing what is on your own machine. Writing that down now costs nothing and makes it far more likely to happen.
Signals that the limits need revisiting
- You have stopped checking signatures. The strongest single predictor of a bad outcome, and it arrives quietly after a good stretch.
- You are funding more than you spend. A balance that grows is a decision being made by inertia.
- You are hurrying. Being consistently in a rush changes your odds more than any setting does.
- The amount would now matter if it went. That is a different situation from the one you set the limits in.