Read this first

Before you start: how RiskBrake works

RiskBrake is a hard risk lock for your trading platform. You set your limits when you are calm; when you hit one, RiskBrake blocks new entries until the next session. This page takes three minutes and it matters: the lock is deliberate and hard to undo, so you should understand it before your first live session, not during a red day.

What it actually does

You set a few rules once: daily loss limit, weekly loss limit, max trades per day, a cooldown after losing trades, a max-contracts cap, an optional daily profit goal, and a profit giveback guard (once you are up on the day, giving back a set percentage of your peak profit ends the day, so a green day stays green). RiskBrake watches your trades through a strategy on your ATAS chart and counts your losses and P&L on our server. When a limit is hit, every new entry is instantly closed and blocked until the next session. There is also a panic button in your dashboard: one click locks you out until tomorrow, for the moment you feel the tilt coming. Closing or reducing an open position is always allowed. Only new risk is stopped.

One thing is worth saying plainly, because most tools of this kind get it wrong: being locked does not mean losing your platform. When a limit hits, RiskBrake shuts the order panel inside ATAS and closes anything you still try to open. Your charts, your drawings and your journal stay where they are. ATAS is only ever closed in one single case, described further down, and you have to walk into it three times on purpose.

Trading sessions

You can define up to two windows in your local time, for example London and New York. Outside them, new entries are blocked and closed. Each session has a trade it switch, so you can decide in the morning which one you are trading today, and each has a lock button: hold it for 1.5 seconds and that session is closed for the rest of the day, instantly and with no undo, while the other one keeps running. A bad morning does not have to cost you the afternoon, and it does not have to tempt you either.

One rule matters here more than any other: sessions never reset your counters. Daily loss, weekly loss and trade count are day totals across both sessions. If you hit your daily limit in session one, session two is closed too. A second session structures your day, it does not double your risk.

The journal

Your dashboard has a journal that writes itself: every trade you closed lands in a TradeZella-style calendar with your P&L, win rate and discipline stats, locks and blocked attempts included. If auto screenshots are enabled (they are by default), the guardian captures your ATAS chart windows only, all of them if you trade several, never your full screen and never the platform log, at entry and exit, and attaches the images to the trade, so you can review later what you actually saw. Both can be switched off any time in the RiskBrake strategy settings inside ATAS, and neither switch changes your limits or locks in any way. You can delete a single screenshot or a whole trade, and only you can see your journal.

One thing on purpose: an entry that RiskBrake closed because you were locked is not a trade and does not appear in the journal. It was a blocked attempt, and it is counted as one under discipline. Otherwise your win rate and your best and worst day would be shaped by trades you never really took.

Several accounts

The strategy sees every account your ATAS connection has, and your dashboard lists them under Protected accounts. By default all of them are protected, including accounts you connect later. You can uncheck an account you do not want counted, for example a practice account, and that choice only takes effect with your next rule change.

Every account has its own limits. Daily loss, weekly loss, trades per day, daily profit goal, contracts and the giveback guard are set on the account itself, so a 50k evaluation account and a 150k funded account do not have to share one number. Click an account in your dashboard to open its values.

Above them sits one bracket, All accounts together: total daily loss, total daily profit goal, total weekly loss and total trades per day. Fill it in. Without it, ten accounts at $500 each mean $5,000 of daily risk and a $400 goal quietly becomes $4,000. Your profit giveback guard applies to the total as well, otherwise you could give back the day's peak on one account and simply carry on with the next. Whatever hits first, the single account or the bracket, ends the day.

An account you have not set up yet takes no new entries. A brand new account, or one your broker just renamed, has no limits RiskBrake knows about, so any entry there is closed immediately and your chart says NEW ACCOUNT. Positions that were already open are never touched and can always be closed. Setting an account up for the first time is free and works at any time, even outside your change window: it is not loosening a rule, it is filling in a blank.

What stays global: your cooldown after losing trades, your trading sessions, the emotion pause and your change window apply to you, not to a single account. If you are tilted after two losses, you are tilted on every account, and a cooldown you could sidestep on the next account would not be one.

Copying trades across accounts

Copying one master trade to nine accounts produces nine closed positions. That is nine real losses, but only one decision, and counting it as nine trades makes your trade limit meaningless. RiskBrake handles this on its own: when several accounts close the same thing within 15 seconds, that counts as one trade for your trade count and your losing streak. There is nothing to switch on, and it works even if you copy some trades and take others on a single account.

Every dollar still counts in full, on each account and in the total. That part is not negotiable: nine copies are nine times the risk, and your loss limits must see that. Your dashboard shows both numbers, for example 3 trades today (27 fills), so nothing is hidden.

Contracts are limited per account, never as a sum across accounts. A position copied to ten accounts is still one position, and a total cap would have stopped you at the third copy while you were trading small.

Understand this before your first session

A lock cannot be undone in the moment. Once a limit is hit, you are out until the next session. That is the whole point. It exists to beat the version of you that wants one more trade.
An account without limits does not trade. Every ATAS account needs its numbers once, in your dashboard. Until then RiskBrake closes any new entry on it immediately. This also catches an account your broker renamed, which then looks like a new one. Positions that are already open are never touched.
The weekly commitment is stronger. If you choose the weekly lock period, you cannot loosen your limits again for seven rolling days. Pick it deliberately.
The change window is the strongest. You pick one weekly time slot in your local time, for example Sunday 10:00 to 12:00, and settings can only be changed inside that window. Outside it everything is frozen, including switching back to daily or weekly. Put it on a day the market is closed, so future you negotiates with a cold head.
Leaving takes until the next morning. You can stop using RiskBrake any time from your dashboard, but removal only unlocks the next morning, and never while you are locked out. You cannot use uninstalling to escape an active lock.
Keep ATAS and the guardian running. If you pause or remove the strategy while you are locked, you get a 2 minute grace window to put it back. That window is a one time budget per lock: turning the strategy on and off again does not reset it. When it runs out, trading stays locked — but you keep your platform, your charts and your journal.
Trying to trade on a locked account ends that account. ATAS cannot stop a manual order, so RiskBrake closes it instantly. You get a warning on the first and second attempt; on the third, that account is locked until tomorrow. Your other accounts keep trading, and ATAS stays open.
Without the strategy, RiskBrake closes every position you open. If you take the strategy off your chart while you are locked, the guardian cannot see your account any more — so it does the only thing it still can: it watches your chart and closes any position that appears, within seconds. You get a warning window each time, counting up. After the third one, ATAS is closed for the day. This is the only situation in which RiskBrake takes your platform away, and you have to walk into it three times to get there.
While you are locked, the order panel is held shut. RiskBrake switches on ATAS' own trading lock, so the entry cannot even be placed. Because that lock is platform wide in ATAS, it closes the panel on every chart, not only the one carrying the strategy. It is only ever switched on while nothing is open on any account, never with a position running, because a shut panel would also block closing. If you need to move to another account, click ATAS' "unlock trading" once: RiskBrake holds back for 15 seconds so you can switch. Move to a free account and the panel stays open; stay on the locked one and it closes again. While any lock is running — a panic press, a closed session, your daily limit, or simply being outside your trading hours — it closes again straight away, because there is no free account to move to. You can still read your charts and draw on them; only orders are off the table.
The panel is never shut while RiskBrake is blind. If the strategy is not reporting, the guardian cannot know whether you have a position somewhere — and a shut panel would also block closing it. So in that state the panel stays open, deliberately, and the protection comes from speed instead: anything you open is closed again within seconds. You will never be locked out of a position you still need to manage.
ATAS is never closed while a position is open. Not when it can see your position, and not when it cannot. If the strategy stops reporting while the last thing it saw was an open position, ATAS stays open so you can manage it yourself, and the gap is written into your journal.
A new account does not clear a lock. If you sign up again with a different email while a lock is running, the new account inherits that lock on the same computer, down to the same minute. Signing up twice is not a way out, it is just a longer way to the same wall.

Set up in six steps

Create your free account and confirm your email.
Run the installer. Close ATAS, start RiskBrake Setup.exe, and sign in. It installs the guardian and the ATAS strategy.
Add the strategy to one chart. In ATAS, drop the "RiskBrake" strategy onto a single chart you keep open. It watches every account your ATAS connection has from there: every instrument you trade counts towards that account's limits, and when a limit is hit, the open positions on that account are closed, not just the one on that chart. A small badge shows your live status.
Set the limits for each account. Your accounts appear in the dashboard a few seconds after ATAS starts. Open each one and set its numbers while you are calm. Until an account has limits, it takes no new entries, so this step is not optional. It takes about twenty seconds per account, and you can copy the values from an account you already did.
Set the bracket over all accounts and your cooldown, sessions and change window. These apply to you, not to a single account.
Trade normally. The guardian runs quietly in the background. Your dashboard shows exactly how much room you have left before the next lock, per account and in total.

Everything the tool needs is bundled in the installer, so there is nothing else to set up. It also keeps itself up to date: the guardian checks hourly whether the chart strategy has a newer version, verifies its checksum and swaps it in the next time ATAS is closed. You will not have to reinstall for strategy improvements.

One setting inside ATAS is handled for you. ATAS asks for confirmation before it cancels orders unless one-click mode is switched on, and that confirmation is a modal window: while it waits for an answer, nothing else in ATAS responds — not even RiskBrake trying to close your position. The setting sits on every chart individually, which makes it easy to miss on one of them. So the guardian switches it on for you, in your ATAS workspace files, while ATAS is closed. It keeps a backup of every file it touches and changes nothing else in them.

How the lock stays honest

The lock state and the unlock time live on our server, not on your machine, so changing your Windows clock does nothing and reinstalling ATAS does not clear an active lock. Locks end at midnight your local time, wherever you trade from. While a lock is running, your settings are frozen too, so you cannot widen a limit to get out of one. ATAS Market Replay is exempt, so backtesting is never touched. Demo and live accounts are both enforced, which is exactly why you can test RiskBrake safely on a demo account first. And there is one rule it never breaks: it only ever sends close orders, never blocks a close, so you are never trapped in a losing position.

The strategy reports every two seconds, independently of market data, so quiet periods like the daily rollover or a weekend never look like a missing strategy. If it really does go silent while you are locked, you get a clear countdown before anything happens, and ATAS is never closed with a position still open.

Every rule you can set

Daily loss limit	Lose this much today and you are out until tomorrow.
Weekly loss limit	The same for the whole week, so three bad days cannot become a bad month.
Max trades per day	The direct cure for overtrading. Counts every instrument on that account, and the bracket counts them across all of them.
Cooldown after losses	One loss five minutes, two losses ten, three losses fifteen, your numbers. A win does not reset the counter, because tilt does not either.
Max contracts per position	Size cap for a single position, set per account so a big account can carry more than a small one. Anything above it is reduced automatically, so revenge sizing is off the table.
Daily profit goal	Hit your number and the day is done. Optional, and the hardest one to keep on your own.
Profit giveback guard	Once you are up by a set amount, giving back a set percentage of your peak ends the day. A green day stays green.
Trading sessions	Up to two windows, each with its own switch and its own lock button.
Panic button	One click, locked until tomorrow, no undo. For the five honest seconds when you know you are about to tilt.
Your accounts	Own limits for every account, plus one bracket over all of them. An account without limits takes no new entries.
Emotion pause	A key you press yourself when you feel it coming: 10 minutes locked. Press it again to add 10 more (during the pause or within an hour of it ending, up to two hours) - after a longer break it starts at 10 again. It lives on the server, so it cannot be clicked away.
Hot keys	Two keys you choose in the ATAS strategy settings: one closes every open position on every account, one triggers the emotion pause. They work on any chart while ATAS has focus, also on charts without the strategy.
Commitment period	Change your rules once a day, commit for a full week, or lock changes to one weekly time window (for example Sunday morning). The window is the strongest setting here.

Every limit shows you how much room is left before it bites, on each account and for the bracket over all of them, so you always know where you stand without doing the maths yourself.

If something goes wrong

Write to support@riskbrake.com and describe what happened. We answer by email, usually the same day, and during the beta your feedback goes straight into the next version.