How Openbell works
Openbell is a hosted execution engine. You connect your brokerage account, set the rules you want traded, and the engine does the scanning, sizing, ordering and stop management on your behalf.
This page covers what the platform does, what protects you, and what happens when something breaks. It deliberately does not publish entry thresholds or signal logic.
What you control#
Every one of these is yours to set, and the engine cannot exceed them.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Risk per trade | The share of account equity a single position may lose if its stop is hit. Position size is derived from this and your stop distance — never from a fixed share count. |
| Max open positions | A hard ceiling on concurrent exposure. A qualifying setup is skipped rather than queued once the ceiling is reached. |
| Daily loss limit | The point at which the engine stops opening new positions for the session. |
| Which strategies may fire | Each strategy can be armed or left in alert-only mode. Alert-only strategies never place an order. |
| Kill switch | Halts new entries immediately. Open positions can be flattened from the dashboard or directly at your broker. |
Sizing is always the dependent variable. You state what you are willing to lose; the engine solves for share count.
What protects the position#
Stops live at your broker, not in our software. Every entry is placed with a good-till-cancelled stop attached at the broker. This is the single most important design decision in the platform, and it is what makes the next section survivable.
Nothing is left naked. A guardian process continuously reconciles open positions against working stop orders. If a position is ever found without protection — a rejected stop, a partial fill, a broker-side cancellation — a replacement stop is placed automatically, and the event is recorded as an incident rather than passing silently.
Every fill is journaled. Entry, exit, strategy attribution, hold time and realized P&L are written for every round-trip. The track record published on the home page is generated from that journal, unedited.
When something fails#
Automated trading systems are judged by their worst day, not their best, so these are stated plainly.
If our engine goes offline, your protective stops are still working. They are resting orders at your broker and do not depend on our infrastructure being reachable. This is the reason for broker-side stops.
If your broker is unreachable, the engine cannot read positions or place orders. It reports the outage rather than assuming a flat book — an unreachable broker is never treated as "no positions" or "no risk".
If a component stops responding, it is detected by absence rather than by error. Every component reports a heartbeat; one going quiet raises an incident, because a scanner that dies silently produces no error message while quietly ceasing to trade.
Restarts are visible. A restart during market hours is recorded as an incident, because in-flight state is rebuilt from the broker rather than assumed.
Your money and your keys#
We never take custody. Funds stay in the brokerage account you already own. Openbell connects through your broker's API to place orders in that account — it cannot move money out of it.
Keys are stored encrypted and used only to place and manage orders on your behalf. We recommend issuing a trading-only key with withdrawals disabled, so the permission to move funds is never granted in the first place.
Your data is yours alone. Account queries — including anything you ask the assistant — are scoped to your own account at the database level, not by convention. One member's session cannot read another member's positions, orders or history.
The assistant#
Every member account includes Stocky, a read-only assistant wired to the same brokerage account as the engine. It can tell you what you are holding, where each stop sits and what it costs if hit, your total open risk against your limits, which orders filled or were rejected, and what you realized on a given day.
It is read-only by construction: it can report, but it cannot place, change or cancel an order. Every figure it quotes comes from your broker — it is not permitted to estimate, and when data cannot be retrieved it says so rather than reporting a zero.
What this is not#
- Not a signal service. Signals leave execution to you. Openbell places the trade, sizes it to your risk, and manages the stop.
- Not advice. Nothing here is investment advice, and past performance does not guarantee future returns.
- Not risk-free. Automated trading carries risk of loss, including loss beyond your intended risk per trade during fast or gapping markets. A stop is an order, not a guarantee of price.
Source: PLATFORM.md in the repository.