Engineering notes

• Your daily loss limit resets when MetaTrader restarts. Here is the fix. — why in-terminal guards lose their state, and how to make one that survives a restart.
• Is an account-level guard worth it? An honest decision guide — when the extra layer earns its place, and when it does not.
• Is your guard real or decorative? A checklist — twelve questions that separate a guard from a decoration.
• Memory plus an expiry policy: what a restarted guard is allowed to assume — the hard half of persistence is the assumptions, not the serialisation.
• Detection is not resolution: the gap that makes guards decorative — time-to-detect is an engineering metric; time-to-effect describes the damage.
• Decisionless monitoring: the reports nobody acts on — if a report changes no decision it belongs on a dashboard, not in an inbox.
• What a kill switch should actually do (and the four ways they fail) — never armed, never disarmed, wrong trigger, wrong clock.
• Silent failures in trading automation: the three that cost the most — guards that read zero, configs that override code, and state that dies with the process.
• Which day is it? Broker time, host time, and the trading-day boundary — three clocks can disagree, and the failure is silent.