How to configure Grit Markets risk controls

Grit Markets automates a Martingale-based strategy, which means its risk controls are not optional extras; they are the difference between a bounded worst case and an unbounded one. Risk is configured from your dashboard, not in MT5: the EA itself exposes only your licence key, a telemetry switch and a magic number, and receives its strategy configuration from the platform as one of three risk profiles. Every profile keeps the equity stop armed — there is no configuration of Grit Markets without a hard stop. The guiding principle is honest: a tighter profile reduces the size of drawdowns and realises small losses more often, a looser profile does the reverse, and no profile removes the risk of losing the account balance. Decide your worst case first, then pick the profile that enforces it.

1. 01

   Decide your maximum acceptable loss before touching any setting

   Write down, as an amount of money, the most you are prepared to lose on the account running Grit Markets. Not per trade and not per month: in total, in the worst case. Every subsequent choice exists to enforce this number, and if you skip this step the choices have nothing to enforce. If the honest answer is that you cannot afford to lose the balance on this account, fund a smaller account before proceeding.

2. 02

   Understand what a risk profile controls

   A profile bundles the engine's sizing and protection parameters — first-leg size, ladder depth and spacing, and the equity stop level — into one audited choice. Conservative runs a shallower ladder with the tightest stop; Balanced is the shipped configuration; Aggressive runs a deeper ladder and tolerates a deeper drawdown before flattening. The dashboard shows each profile's equity stop and its worst-case exposure relative to Balanced, so you can compare them against the number you wrote down. The raw parameter values are managed server-side and delivered to the EA directly — they are the strategy's engineering, not user settings.

3. 03

   Know your equity stop

   Every profile keeps the equity stop armed: when floating losses reach the profile's percentage of your balance, the whole basket closes and trading halts for the day. Pick the profile whose stop percentage, applied to your balance, stays inside the maximum loss from step one. Be aware of its limits: in a fast or gapping market the closing prices can be worse than the trigger level, so the realised loss can exceed the configured one.

4. 04

   Size the account, not the lot

   First-leg sizing is fixed within each profile, so the variable you control is the account balance behind it. The engine was engineered against a 2,500 baseline per 0.01 of first-leg volume — an underfunded account reaches its equity stop on shallower, more ordinary ladders. Fund the account to at least that baseline, and use the simulator on gritmarkets.com to see what drawdowns the ladder geometry produces at your balance before committing real money.

5. 05

   Trust the always-on protections

   Independent of profile choice, the engine pauses around high-impact USD and EUR calendar events, classified by what they are rather than the calendar's own star rating: rate decisions, NFP and central-bank press conferences carry the widest window (24 hours before to 2 hours after), CPI and GDP the next (60 minutes before to 90 after), other high-impact releases the base tier (30 before to 60 after), with the calendar's rating as a fallback so nothing goes unclassified. On top of that sits the maintained no-trade calendar — built from a 16.5-year study of this strategy class's stop-out events and delivered to the EA automatically — plus a Friday cutoff before the weekend close, a Monday warm-up, a rollover blackout around broker midnight, and a holiday block over Christmas and New Year. These are part of the engine, not options to configure away. Remember their limit: filters cover scheduled events and studied history; the most damaging moves are often unscheduled and unprecedented.

6. 06

   Verify the configuration on a demo account

   Attach the EA to a demo account of the same size and broker conditions as your intended live account, apply your chosen profile from the dashboard, and let it run until you have watched at least one full recovery basket form and resolve. Confirm the equity stop and ladder behaviour in the dashboard's analytics. A configuration you have watched fail safely on demo is worth more than any backtest.

7. 07

   Go live, then review on a schedule and never mid-basket

   Once live, review your profile on a fixed schedule, monthly is reasonable, and after any market event that changes your view of risk. Profile changes require two-factor re-authentication, are audited, and are applied by the EA only when no recovery sequence is open — never mid-ladder — so a change submitted during a drawdown simply waits. If you find yourself wanting a looser profile mid-drawdown, that is precisely the moment not to switch.