The side of a signal that decides whether it should be taken at all.
Read this first
The calculator below is an arithmetic teaching tool. It shows how
position size follows from a stop distance — nothing more. It does not know your
finances, it is not a recommendation, and it is not personalised financial advice.
Crypto can move further and faster than any stop assumes.
Position size from stop distance
The only input that should decide size is how much you lose if the stop is hit.
What each risk reading means
ATR (Average True Range)
Typical distance price travels in one bar. A stop tighter than ATR is likely to be hit by ordinary noise rather than by being wrong.
Volatility regime
Whether current movement is calm, normal or extreme relative to its own recent history. Extreme volatility widens every outcome, good and bad.
Liquidity grade
How much size the order book can absorb. Thin books mean the price you see is not the price you get.
Spread
The gap between best bid and best ask. It is a cost you pay on entry and again on exit, before any move in your favour.
CVaR (Expected Shortfall)
The average loss in the worst tail of outcomes — not the typical loss, the bad ones.
Market regime
Trending, ranging or shocked. A method that works in one regime routinely fails in another.
Data quality
If a feed is stale or exchanges disagree, the engine returns WAIT rather than a confident call on unreliable input.
R and R:R
1R is the distance from entry to stop. A 2R target means you stand to gain twice what you risk — it says nothing about how often you win.
Why WAIT is a result, not a failure
A system that produces a direction on every candle is not measuring anything. Our
engine returns WAIT when the evidence does not clear its thresholds — and it names
the reason: conflicting timeframes, weak liquidity, a volatility spike, stale data,
cross-exchange disagreement, or an expected move smaller than trading costs.
Expect a large share of WAIT results. That is the design working, not the engine
being unhelpful.