What you are actually trading
A synthetic index is volatile by design. On the higher-volatility indices a contract can lose its entire stake within a few ticks, and at one-tick durations you can place more trades in ten minutes than a stock trader places in a month. Both of those are properties of the product, not accidents.
The mathematics are not in your favour over a long enough run. A strategy that wins more often than it loses can still lose money if the payouts are smaller than the stakes at risk. Before you fund an account, be able to state what your edge is and why it survives the payout structure.
The controls, and what each one does
All of these are in Settings → Account limits. They take effect immediately and they are enforced server-side, so nothing in the browser can bypass them.
Maximum stake
The most you can put on any single contract. Refused at purchase, not warned about afterwards.
Maximum open positions
A ceiling on how many contracts can be live at once, which caps total exposure rather than per-trade exposure.
Daily loss limit
Once the day’s realised losses reach it, no further contracts can be bought until the day rolls over.
Daily deposit limit
The most that can be added to the account in a day. The single most useful control, because it caps the damage rather than the trade.
A limit can only be tightened
This is deliberate and worth understanding. You can lower a limit at any time and it applies at once. Raising one is checked against the platform maximum, and a limit can never be set to zero, because zero means “no limit” internally and would silently remove the cap through the control whose whole purpose is to impose it.
If you want a limit gone entirely, clear the override rather than setting it to zero, and think about why you are doing it at the moment you are doing it.
Questions people actually ask
Can I take a break from the account?
Yes. Set your daily deposit limit to a small amount and your maximum stake low, and revoke your other signed-in devices from Settings so the account cannot be reached from a phone you are trying not to use.
Does the demo behave the same as the real account?
Yes, and that is the point. Same engine, same tick stream, same settlement path, same contract types. The only difference is whose money it is. If a strategy does not work on the demo over a few hundred trades, it does not work.
What if I think something settled wrongly?
Replay the contract from your trade history. It shows the entry tick, the barrier if there was one, and the exact tick and sequence number it settled against. If that does not match what you expected, open a support ticket with the contract reference and we will go through it with you.
Getting help
If trading has stopped being something you choose and started being something you do, that is worth taking seriously and it is more common than people admit. Gambling support services exist in Kenya and elsewhere and can be reached independently of us. We would rather you close the account than keep it open for our benefit.
Set your limits first
They take thirty seconds, they apply immediately, and they are the only part of this page that does anything on its own.