Why My Bot Did / Didn't Trade

Smartbull is not a manual bot. You don't set entry/exit rules. The orchestrator runs every minute, evaluates the live walk-forward catalog, picks the top-5 sleeves by Sharpe with greedy decorrelation, then sizes positions inside your risk caps.

If you see no trades for a stretch, the orchestrator decided none of the sleeves had edge above slippage right now — which is the correct action. Forcing trades is what blows accounts.

1. BTC regime is OFF. Most trend sleeves only fire when BTC is above its 200-day EMA (with hysteresis). Check the regime badge on /lab — if it's red, that's by design. 2. DD-brake is active on a sleeve class. Phase 82 split the risk brake per class (trend / carry / xcarry). If trend hit a 15% drawdown, trend allocation scales to 40% until it recovers 5%. 3. AI Sentiment Shield blocked. If market sentiment is BEARISH with high confidence, BUY orders are blocked. 4. VaR gate triggered. Adding the proposed position would push portfolio VaR above your risk level's threshold. 5. Funding rates are extreme. Funding gate skips entries when funding implies negative expected return. 6. L2 spread is too wide. Microstructure gate skips low-liquidity symbols. 7. You're under minimum allocation. Sub-$200 allocations often round to zero on exchanges with $5-10 min order sizes. 8. Kill-switch is on. Operator can globally pause all bots. 9. Global DD breaker halted you. Your account hit 20% drawdown from peak — manual reset required. 10. Cold-start cap. New bots are limited to $1,000 notional for the first 14 days.

Go to /dashboard → Recent orders. Every tick logs a row: - filled — order placed and confirmed - skipped — we evaluated, no qualifying target (with reason: "regime-off", "funding-gate", "dd-brake", "var-gate", "sentiment-blocked", "below-min-notional") - failed — exchange rejected (error text included)

If you only ever see "skipped — regime-off", that's the system protecting capital. The 5y backtests show those periods are exactly when manual traders give back gains.