Buffer Percent
Holding part of your exchange balance back from margin.
Buffer Percent reserves a slice of your exchange balance and keeps the bot's own trading out of it. It is the one setting here that has nothing to do with how much a trade may lose - it decides how much of the account a trade may use.
Without it, sizing is free to commit the account down to its last dollar, and the position that does so is the one with no room left for the exchange to move against it.
Where to find it
Main menu → 📊 Risk Management → 🛡️ Buffer Percent
1%
Percentage of your Bybit balance to hold back. Must be from 0 to 5%.
Reply to this message with the new value.
📖 How this panel works9:35 PMReply with a number. Send 1, not 1%.
It is a percentage of your exchange balance only
Not of total balance. Collateral Balance is excluded on purpose: money held off the exchange can never be posted as margin, so a buffer measured against it would reserve capital that was never available in the first place.
On an account with $2145.30 on the exchange, the buffer is worth:
| Buffer Percent | Held back |
|---|---|
1% | $21.45 |
2% | $42.90 |
5% | $107.26 |
A $500.00 Collateral Balance changes none of those figures.
The dollar amount is recomputed from your live exchange balance every time it is used, and truncated down to the cent, so the reserve shown on the panel is exactly the reserve a trade honours.
What it actually blocks
Before placing a trade, the bot takes the largest position Max Risk Per Trade would allow and works out the leverage that position needs against what is genuinely spendable:
usable balance = exchange balance − maintenance margin − Buffer Percent in dollarsIf nothing is left once maintenance margin and the buffer are taken out, the trade is refused before anything reaches the exchange:
Reason: Insufficient margin available. Please add more funds or reduce trade size.If something is left but the position would need more leverage than the symbol allows, it is
refused as Leverage too high instead. The smaller the usable balance, the more leverage a
position needs - so a larger buffer makes that refusal come sooner.
Either one is a rejection, logged to your history and sent as a Trade Rejected notification. Nothing was placed and nothing was risked. An add to an existing trade also subtracts the margin that position already holds; an add refused for margin is answered with a popup on the panel rather than a notification.
Raising the buffer does not shrink your trades
Position size comes from the trade's Initial Risk % and the distance to your stop. The buffer is checked after that size exists, so it never quietly makes a trade smaller - it either fits or the trade is turned away.
Accepted values
| Range | 0 to 5 |
| Unit | Percent of your exchange balance |
| Scope | Per account - every account has its own value |
| Default | 2% until you change it |
The prompt states the rule itself:
Percentage of your Bybit balance to hold back. Must be from 0 to 5%.Ask for more than five percent and the refusal names the cap directly:
Buffer Percent can't exceed 5% of your Bybit balance.Five percent is a hard ceiling so that a trade can always still be placed. A reserve much
larger than that starts refusing trades on an account that plainly has the money for them.
0 is accepted, and switches the reserve off.
The cap is a flat 5%, with no balance involved
When you reply, the bot compares the number you typed against five and nothing else. It does not look your balance up to do it - a percentage is being checked against a percentage, so there is nothing to look up.
The reserve cannot go stale either. Because the setting is a share rather than a fixed sum, a balance that halves is met by a buffer holding back the same share and half the dollars. This setting used to be a fixed dollar amount, and that version had the problem this one cannot have: as an account shrank, an unchanged reserve swallowed more and more of it, until every trade was refused for insufficient margin with nothing on screen to say why.
When a value is refused
Every setting on the Risk Management screens is edited the same way - a prompt, a reply, a rule - and every one of them refuses a bad value the same way too. Buffer Percent is the example here; read it as the behaviour of all of them.
1%
Percentage of your Bybit balance to hold back. Must be from 0 to 5%.
Reply to this message with the new value.
📖 How this panel works9:35 PMThe prompt comes back with the rule repeated at the top as a ⚠️ warning. It is the same
screen, showing the same Current value, because nothing was saved - a refused reply
leaves the setting exactly as it was. Your typed message is deleted along with the old
prompt, so the chat does not fill up with attempts.
Reply again with a value inside the rule and it saves, the prompt disappears, and the panel you started from is updated in place.
Every prompt arrives with a Cancel above it
This small message is sent just before the prompt itself, on every settings edit.
It is there because Telegram tells a bot when you reply to a prompt but never when you dismiss the reply box without sending anything. With no signal to react to, the bot cannot clean up after a prompt you walked away from - so it gives you a button that says so explicitly. Tapping ❌ Cancel deletes both the Cancel message and the prompt it points at, and changes nothing.
The button and the prompt cannot live on the same message: Telegram will not put an inline keyboard on a message that opens the reply box. Two messages is the only shape available.