QUESTION
What changes when risk controls run before order construction rather than as post-trade reconciliation?
- 01
HYPOTHESIS
Structural pre-trade controls — risk cap, R:R floor, cost-budget filter — change the population of admitted trades, not just their outcomes.
- 02
METHOD
Pipeline architecture with controls as gates: position size derives from stop distance and risk cap; setups failing the 1:4 R:R floor or cost budget never reach execution.
- 03
EVIDENCE
automated_trading_os implements 1% per-trade risk cap, minimum 1:4 R:R, fee/slippage modelling, cost-budget filtering, profit lock and giveback limit.
- 04
RESULT
The admitted-trade population is defined by rules rather than discretion; every admitted trade satisfies all structural constraints by construction.
- 05
LIMITATION
Ablation studies quantifying each control's individual contribution are ongoing.
- 06
CONCLUSION
Order-of-operations matters: controls applied after sizing are advice; controls applied before are physics.
EVIDENCE SOURCE
AUTOMATED TRADING OS
A trade is not a signal — it is a pipeline of decisions from higher timeframe context down to fill, each stage governed by explicit risk rules.
METHOD — PAPER · STRUCTURAL TEST