Dollar Risk Cap
Enforcing the calculated dollar risk as a hard ceiling.
Dollar Risk Cap is a switch, not a number. It decides whether a trade also carries a fixed dollar budget for its risk, or is bounded by quantity alone.
It matters only for trades you scale into. A trade you open once and leave alone is sized by Max Risk Per Trade either way, and this switch changes nothing about it.
Where to find it
Main menu → 📊 Risk Management → the 💵 Dollar Risk Cap button.
$1616.24 to hot wallet
This will bring Bybit balance to $529.06 (20% of total)
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📊 Max Risk Per Trade: 2.5% ($66.13)
💵 Dollar Risk Cap: Enabled
🏦 Collateral Balance: $500.00 (18.9%)
🛡️ Buffer Percent: 1% ($21.45)
⚖️ Balance Range: 15-25%
Tap a field below to update it.
📖 How this panel works9:35 PMThere is no prompt and nothing to type. Tapping the button flips it and redraws the panel, so the button always reads its own current state:
| Button | Meaning |
|---|---|
💵 Dollar Risk Cap: Enabled | New trades get a fixed dollar risk budget. This is how a new account starts. |
💵 Dollar Risk Cap: Disabled | New trades get no dollar budget; only their quantity ceiling binds. |
What the cap actually bounds
When the bot opens a position it records the largest that trade may ever become - a quantity ceiling, worked out from Max Risk Per Trade and the stop loss you opened with. Every leg you add later spends part of that ceiling.
With the cap enabled, the trade is given a second, separate budget at the same moment:
dollar budget = Max Risk Per Trade % × total balance, at the moment the trade openedEvery add is then checked against both, and the one that runs out first is the one that stops you.
With the cap disabled, no dollar figure is written at all, and the quantity ceiling is the only limit for the life of that trade.
Why a quantity ceiling is not enough on its own
A ceiling is measured in coins. What a coin costs you in risk is not fixed - it depends on how far away that leg's stop loss is, and on the fees you pay to get in and out again.
Add a leg with a much wider stop than the original, and each unit of it puts far more dollars at risk than the units the ceiling was calculated from. The quantity still fits. The risk does not. That is the case the dollar cap exists to catch, and the reason it is on by default.
Fees are counted twice on every add
An add enters at market and its stop leaves at market, so the taker fee is paid on both sides. Both are charged against the budget. Counting the fee once made a "2% max risk" trade quietly cost 2% plus the entry fee.
Where you see the budget being spent
On the Add To Position panel:
Remaining Budget Available: $1.65 / $2.14Dollars of risk left, over the budget the trade was given. When the cap is switched off for a trade, that line is absent entirely rather than showing an empty figure - its absence is how you tell which kind of trade you are looking at.
An add that does not fit is shrunk, not refused. The bot places what the budget can afford and notes it on the confirmation:
(capped from requested 0.005)Marking a leg breakeven gives some of the budget back, since a leg that can no longer lose is no longer spending risk - see Mark Legs Breakeven.
The cap is fixed when the trade opens
This is the part worth reading twice.
The budget is calculated once, from your balance at the moment the position opened, and written onto that trade. Nothing recalculates it afterwards. If your balance doubles, that trade's budget does not; if you raise Max Risk Per Trade, that trade keeps the smaller budget it was born with.
The switch behaves the same way. Toggling it changes what the next trade gets, and has no effect on positions that are already open - a trade opened with a budget keeps it, and a trade opened without one never acquires it.
Which state you want
Enabled means "this trade may never risk more than the dollars it was worth on the day I opened it" - a hard figure that survives the balance moving under it.
Disabled means "let the trade grow to its full quantity ceiling, whatever the dollars work out to." That is the looser of the two, and it is the one that lets a wide-stopped add cost more than you planned.
What it does not do
- It does not change how the first entry is sized. That is Max Risk Per Trade and the risk you asked for, both of which apply with the cap off.
- It does not cap your day. That is the Daily Loss Limit, which keeps its own budget across every trade and is unaffected by this switch.
- It does not affect margin. The margin a position may use is bounded by Buffer Percent.