Restrictions Block
Limit when, how often, and under what conditions your strategy trades.
The Restrictions block acts as a guardrail for your strategy. It limits when the strategy is allowed to trade, how many positions it can have open, and how many trades it can take per day. Think of it as the discipline layer that prevents overtrading and keeps your strategy focused.
Why It Matters
Even a great strategy can lose money if it trades too often, during low-quality sessions, or with too many open positions. Restrictions help you avoid these pitfalls by enforcing rules that go beyond entry signals — focusing on when and how much the strategy should trade.
How to Use It
- 1Add the Restrictions block to your strategy
- 2Configure the limits you want to enforce
- 3The block will automatically prevent trades that violate your rules
Settings Explained
Max Open Positions — The maximum number of trades the strategy can have open simultaneously. Setting this to 1 means the strategy must close a trade before opening another. Higher values allow multiple concurrent trades across different instruments or setups.
Max Daily Trades — The maximum number of trades the strategy can take in a single day. This prevents overtrading during choppy conditions where signals may fire frequently but quality is low. Once the limit is reached, the strategy waits until the next day.
Trading Sessions — Restricts trading to specific market sessions (London, New York, Asian, or combinations). Different sessions have different characteristics — London and New York tend to be the most active with the cleanest moves.
Trading Days — Which days of the week the strategy is allowed to trade. Many traders avoid Monday (slow start) and Friday (position squaring ahead of the weekend).
Trading Hours — Specific hours during the day when trading is permitted. Useful for strategies that only work during high-liquidity windows.
Example Use Case
You build a scalping strategy on M15 and set the following restrictions: Max Open Positions = 1 (one trade at a time), Max Daily Trades = 5 (prevent overtrading), Trading Sessions = London + New York (highest liquidity), Trading Days = Tuesday through Thursday (most consistent price action). This keeps the strategy disciplined and focused on the highest-quality trading windows.
Session filtering is one of the easiest ways to improve strategy performance. Many strategies that look mediocre across all hours become significantly more profitable when limited to the London or New York session.
If your restrictions are too tight, you may not get enough trades to be statistically meaningful. Make sure your restrictions still allow for a reasonable sample size in backtesting — ideally at least 100+ trades.