My trading bot lost $4,232 running naked. Then I built it a cage.

Description and use

A bot executing a reckless dip‑buy strategy lost $4,232 without safeguards. Adding the cagerail cage, which enforces limits and halts, turned the run into a profitable, low‑risk operation.

Problem

A trading bot that could move 100% of a balance ran without safeguards, resulting in a $4,232 loss and a 132% drawdown.

Outcome

The cage prevented the bot from executing large, uncontrolled orders, limiting exposure to 10% per order, 25% per symbol, and 80% total, and imposed daily‑loss and drawdown halts. This transformed a catastrophic loss into a profitable run with significantly lower risk.

Workflow

• 1. Define a reckless dip‑buy strategy. 2. Run strategy naked against a simulated market. 3. Observe catastrophic loss. 4. Implement cagerail cage with caps, brakes, cooldown, and approval gate. 5. Re‑run identical strategy inside the cage. 6. Record audit logs and evaluate outcomes.

Evidence

The strategy didn’t change. The cage is what made it survivable.

Source

The per-order cap (10% of equity), per-symbol cap (25%) and total exposure cap (80%) simply refused to let the dip-buying cascade become the whole account.

Source

Every decision is written to an audit log in the same event schema as my other project, whoapproved — a flight recorder that reconstructs who approved what across multi-agent sessions.

Source