When an account crosses the daily loss limit you set in TTMT, that account halts. New signal-driven trades stop opening on it. If you chose the close-all action, every open position on that account closes at market and every pending order is cancelled, all at once. The halt is written to a timeline with the numbers at the moment it fired, and the account waits for you or for the next session.
That is the short version. The rest of this post walks through each step in order, because the details are where a funded account is kept or lost. I have covered what a daily loss limit is and why firms enforce two and what an automated cap has to do elsewhere. This one is only about the moment the limit trips.
One thing first: Risk Limits is off by default. You turn it on per account in Settings → Risk and click Save Changes. An account you have not configured has no halt.
What counts toward the limit
The number that trips the halt is your session's realized P&L (profit and loss on trades already closed) plus your floating P&L (the running result on positions still open). A position sitting 40 pips against you counts now, before it closes and before you have decided anything about it.
That matches how prop firms commonly measure a daily loss: against account equity, open positions included, as I covered in my post on why challenges fail. A cap that only counted closed trades would tell you that you had room while the firm's server had already decided otherwise.
Three details decide what the number is measured against:
- The session. TTMT's day is the forex session, which resets at 5 PM ET. At that reset it captures your starting equity and zeroes the day's counters. Your Performance Calendar groups by calendar day, so the two can show different figures for the same date.
- The mode. In percent mode (0.5–50%, default 5%) the limit is a percentage of your equity at the session start. In fixed mode it is a dollar amount you type in.
- The floating figure has a ceiling. If a broker feed reports a floating loss on a position that its own price move, size, and currency conversion cannot explain, the halt check uses the price-implied figure for that position. And a position with no fresh price cannot count for more than its stop loss (SL) at the broker would cost if it filled, with room for slippage, swap, and commission. A real move still counts at full size, and so does any position with no stop at the broker.
The last point exists so that a bad number from a feed does not halt an account over a loss that never happened.
The halt itself
When the total crosses your threshold, the halt applies to that one account. Your other connected accounts keep trading. If the same channel is assigned to a challenge account and a personal account, a halt on the challenge account leaves the personal one taking signals as before.
What happens to open exposure depends on one setting, On Breach Action:
| On Breach Action | New signals | Open positions | Pending orders |
|---|---|---|---|
| Halt new trades only (default) | Blocked | Left running with their own SL, take profit (TP), and trailing stops | Left in place |
| Halt + close all positions | Blocked | Closed at market | Cancelled |
Under the default, TTMT still manages the positions you hold. Stops, targets, and breakeven moves carry on, and you can close or adjust anything by hand from the dashboard or in MetaTrader. The halt only stops new trades from opening.
The catch with the default is plain. If the open positions are the ones losing, the loss keeps growing after the halt until each one reaches its own stop. On a personal account that can be the right trade-off. On funded capital it is usually how the firm's line gets crossed twenty minutes after the software said it had halted.
The close-all sweep
With Halt + close all positions, the halt runs the same close-all engine as the manual kill switch. It closes every open position on the halted account and cancels every pending order, and it sends the closes in parallel rather than one after another, so the account is flattened as fast as the broker fills them.
Two consequences are worth knowing before the day you need them.
It closes winners too. Everything on the account goes at market, including positions that were in profit. That is the price of capping the day.
The trades it closes are marked. In your Trade Log they carry the risk_limit_hit end reason, so a week later you can tell a position the halt closed from one that hit its own stop.
What you see afterwards
A HALTED chip appears in the dashboard header for that account. The halt message shows what you have booked and what is floating, in your account currency, and the two add up to the total on the pause banner.
Open the Risk Limits panel in the header and you get the session timeline: one entry for every halt, resume, and recalibrate, with the P&L at the moment each halt fired. Two figures sit side by side and people ask about them constantly:
- Realized P&L is closed trades only.
- P&L at Halt is realized plus floating at the instant the threshold tripped.
They can differ, and they can carry opposite signs. A profit-target halt can fire on floating profit while realized is negative from stops earlier in the session. Both numbers are correct. They measure different things.
The automatic sweep runs without a dialog, so after a close-all halt, open Live View and confirm the account is flat. A broker can refuse a close, for example when the market is shut.
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Resume and Recalibrate are different actions
Both live in the Resume Trading dialog, which you reach from the halted account's Daily Loss indicator. If you do nothing, trading resumes on its own at the next session reset at 5 PM ET.
Resume Trading clears the halt and keeps the session's counters: the day's realized loss, the trades already counted, and the session-start equity. If you halted at −5% and resume, you resume at −5%. One more losing trade can halt you again within minutes. That is deliberate. Resume means "I have seen the halt and I am choosing to keep trading today." It does not hand you a fresh allowance.
Recalibrate Baseline re-anchors the limit to your current equity. It sits behind the dialog's "Added or withdrew funds?" link, and that label is the whole instruction. Use it after a deposit, a withdrawal, a payout, or a balance adjustment by the broker or the firm. It moves the starting point the limit is measured from. It does not zero your realized loss for the day.
The docs give a clean example. You halt at −5% on a $5,000 account, then deposit $5,000. Recalibrate re-anchors the 5% limit to the new equity of about $10,000, so the cap reflects the account you now have. The day's loss stays on the books.
Using Recalibrate to get out of a halt is moving your own goalposts. The software will let you, and the timeline will record that you did.
What the halt cannot promise
A halt reacts to price. It does not sit ahead of it.
It can overshoot. The trigger fires when the total crosses your line, then the sweep closes at market, and that takes seconds. In a fast move or a gap, the realized loss can land past your number. The docs' own prop-firm example has a 4% limit of about $4,000 on a $100,000 account tripping at −$4,050. That is why the setup guide says to set TTMT's limit at roughly 70–80% of the firm's daily rule and never equal to it.
It does not talk to your firm. This is a trigger on your side. The firm's server keeps its own count, on its own clock, and its verdict is the one that counts.
The clocks can differ. TTMT's session resets at 5 PM ET. Your firm's day may reset at a different hour, so read its rulebook and leave margin for the overlap.
It covers the daily rule only. Most firms also enforce a maximum total drawdown. TTMT does not track that as its own hard stop.
The default does not flatten. If you never changed On Breach Action, a halt blocks new trades and nothing else.
None of this makes a losing strategy work, and I cannot tell you it will keep you inside your firm's rules. What it does is take one decision out of your hands at the moment you are worst at making it.
The full settings table and three worked configurations are in the Risk Limits documentation, and copy trading on a prop firm account covers the rest of the setup. Before any of it touches funded capital, read what prop firm rules allow for an automated copier.
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