Risk Disclosure

Effective 1 November 2026

Trading stocks, futures, options, foreign exchange and crypto-assets carries a high risk of loss, and automated trading adds risks of its own. Read this before you run an algorithm with real money. Only trade with money you can afford to lose.

Trading risk

• You can lose some or all of the money you trade. Past performance doesn't predict future results.
• Crypto-assets are highly volatile, largely unregulated, and can lose most of their value quickly.
• Leverage, margin, futures and short selling can cause losses larger than the money you put in.
• Markets can gap, halt or become illiquid, so orders can fill at prices far from what you expected, or not at all.

Backtests are not predictions

• A backtest shows how an algorithm would have done on historical data, with the benefit of hindsight. It doesn't reflect real trading, fees, slippage or market impact exactly.
• Results can be overstated by overfitting (tuning to the past), look-ahead bias, survivorship bias, and gaps or errors in the data.
• Paper (demo) trading uses simulated money and fills: live results usually differ.

Automated and AI-generated algorithms

• An algorithm does exactly what its code says, including its mistakes, and can trade quickly and repeatedly before you notice.
• Code written or changed by the AI assistant can contain errors or misunderstand what you asked. Review it before you trade with it.
• Background agents try many versions of a strategy, which makes good backtest results more likely to be luck. A final test on unseen dates reduces this but doesn't remove it, and even one strong result says nothing certain about the future.
• Set the safety limits your deployment offers, watch it, and stop it if it behaves unexpectedly.

Technology and third parties

• Outages or faults at MarketsCoder, your broker or exchange, data providers or the internet can stop an algorithm, delay its orders, or leave positions open while it isn't running.
• Brokers and exchanges can reject orders, change rules, suspend trading or fail.
• Anyone with your API keys can trade your account. Give keys the least access needed, never withdrawal rights, and revoke them if you suspect misuse.

No advice

MarketsCoder is software. It doesn't give investment, tax or legal advice, and nothing in it recommends any strategy, asset or trade. Consider getting independent advice before you trade.