Automatic circuit breaker
An alert assumes you are available to react. The circuit breaker assumes nothing: it executes the decision you made calmly, in advance.
What it can do — and what it cannot
It can
Disable one specific robot, identified by its magic number, or every robot on an account. Close already-open positions. Combine the two: close, then suspend.
It cannot
Open a position. Modify a stop. Withdraw funds. Connect to your broker. None of those actions exists in the protocol: it is not a matter of settings, it is an absence of code.
Trigger conditions
A circuit breaker combines up to four conditions. The first one breached triggers the action — there is no cumulative total to reach.
Execution delay, honestly
When a condition is breached, the command is queued. The bridge picks it up on its next call — under a minute in normal operation. It is not instantaneous, and it cannot be: your terminal comes to fetch the orders, not the other way round.
Practical consequence: set the threshold with a little margin. A circuit breaker set exactly on the limit you must not cross will sometimes cross it by a few tenths. And if the terminal is off, no command goes out — the "account offline" rule exists precisely to tell you so.
The news blackout
Around a high-impact macroeconomic release, the spread widens and quotes jump. A stop placed ten points away can be filled thirty points further. The blackout suspends the robot fifteen minutes before and fifteen minutes after — the durations are adjustable — then schedules the resume automatically.
Rearming
A tripped circuit breaker stays tripped: it protects nothing until you rearm it. That is deliberate — automatic rearming after a significant drawdown would have you resume trading without having examined anything.
One exception: daily rearming, which you can enable at creation. It puts the breaker back on standby each morning, useful for daily-loss rules which, by nature, reset with the session.