u/three_red_candles

Screenshot is the actual overview dashboard, priority actions, risk status, and open positions at a glance.

Three things kept happening to me as a swing trader, over and over, regardless of how good my setups were.

First: I'd hold a loser, hoping it would turn around. Watch the bars obsessively, not wanting to take the loss, telling myself "one more bar, it'll turn." It almost never did. By the time I actually exited, the loss was always bigger than what I'd planned for going in.

Second, a specific variant of the same problem: price would actually hit my stop, and instead of just taking the exit, I'd start reading the news and every signal as a reason to wait for a recovery. "It'll come back after the news." Deep down I usually already knew it wouldn't. The exit level was never the hard part, I knew exactly where it was. The hard part was that the losing version of me still got a vote in the moment.

Third, the thing that actually started this whole project: I tried to fix the first two problems by tracking planned risk against actual loss on every trade, to see how big the gap really was. I started in an Excel file. It got messier every week. Eventually I couldn't trust whether I was actually improving or just not looking closely enough.

What I built is Krino, a pre-trade rules engine. The core idea: you configure your own rules, entry conditions, stop-loss, position size, risk caps, and it applies them before you act instead of after. A Pre-Trade Checklist means you have to explicitly confirm capital, stop-loss, and position size before a plan is accepted, no quietly skipping the step when a trade "feels obvious." A Risk Budget System tracks what you've actually got left per account and per symbol, and blocks new plans once it's used up, which is the direct fix for the version of me who kept finding reasons to override my own limits. And a Full Audit Trail logs every decision with its reasoning and timestamp, so the planned-risk-vs-actual-loss tracking that used to live in a spreadsheet is just there automatically.

It never touches your broker, no API keys, no order placement, you still execute every trade yourself wherever you already trade, Saxo, IBKR, Degiro, whatever. It's for daily, weekly, monthly swing-style decisions, not day trading or scalping. Market data runs on your own free Twelve Data API key, nothing resold.

14-day free trial, no card required, and the first 30 people who sign up lock in discounted annual pricing for life.

Happy to answer anything about how it works or why I made specific decisions in the design.

Most of what gets discussed in trading is entries and stops. Almost nobody talks about the third number that actually determines whether a good idea turns into a good trade: how much you buy. You can be early or late on an entry and still come out fine. Size a position wrong and a correct call can still wreck your week.

Here's the thing people skip past: the entry, the stop, and the target can all be identical and you can still end up with wildly different outcomes depending on which sizing method you used to get there. I want to walk through five different ways to answer "how many shares" using the same hypothetical trade, so you can actually see how much the sizing decision alone moves the numbers.

Say you've got a €100,000 account, you're willing to risk 1.2% per trade, and you cap any single position at 40% of the account. You're looking at a stock trading at €205, with a stop at €188 and a target at €236. That's €17 of risk per share and €31 of reward, so the setup itself is about 1:1.8 regardless of how you size it. What changes is everything downstream of that.

**1. Pure risk-based.** You decide the dollar amount you're willing to lose, then divide by the risk per share. 1.2% of €40,000 is €480, divided by €17 risk per share gets you 28 shares. Position value around €5,700, max loss capped at €476. This is the most disciplined version, the loss is the same dollar amount no matter what you're trading, but it can leave you holding tiny positions on wide-stop setups.

**2. Conviction-adjusted.** Same starting point as pure risk-based, but scaled down when your own signals don't agree with each other. If your indicators are mixed rather than unanimous, you size smaller on the same setup. In this example that knocks 28 shares down to 24, a modest haircut. The logic is sound, you're less sure, so you risk less, but it only works if you're honest about how you're defining "sure" in the first place, otherwise it's just vibes with a formula wrapped around them.

**3. Exposure-based.** Forget the stop entirely, just allocate a fixed percentage of the account to the position. 10% of €100,000 divided by the €205 entry price gets you 48 shares. Same stop as before means your actual dollar risk went up to €816, even though you "only" used 10% of the account. This is the trap with exposure-based sizing, it feels conservative because the percentage is small, but it completely ignores stop distance, so a wide stop quietly produces more risk than a tight one at the identical allocation.

**4. EV-scaled.** Take the exposure-based number and multiply it by how strong you think the setup is. A "strong" conviction multiplier of 1.5x on 48 shares gets you to 72 shares, nearly triple the pure risk-based size, with max loss now over €1,200. This can work, but only if "strong" means something consistent and repeatable, not just how confident you feel that morning.

**5. Aggressive.** Go all the way to your max per-symbol allocation. 40% of the account on a €205 stock is 195 shares, max loss over €3,300, nearly seven times the pure risk-based version on the exact same trade. There's a place for this, a genuinely rare, high-conviction setup where you've decided in advance you're willing to take the drawdown, but it should be a deliberate, bounded exception you set rules around ahead of time, not your default.

Lay all five side by side and the spread is the whole point: same entry, same stop, same target, and your share count moves from 28 to 195 depending purely on which model you picked. Screenshot below is this exact trade run through five models at once, same numbers as above:

A few patterns worth avoiding regardless of which model you use: sizing on emotion after a win or a loss, sizing purely on how confident you feel while skipping the actual risk math, ignoring how far your stop is from entry, using one fixed size for every trade regardless of setup, or going so small that fees and slippage eat a meaningful chunk of whatever edge you had. None of these are sizing "methods," they're just the absence of one.

The question worth asking before every trade isn't "is this a good stock." It's "how much am I actually buying if I turn out to be wrong." Pick a model, know exactly why you picked it, and apply it the same way every time. That consistency is most of what separates sizing as a discipline from sizing as a guess with extra steps.

I kept blowing past my own stop-losses, so I built a rules engine that won't let me

How many shares should you actually buy? A breakdown of five position sizing models