Risk disclosures & disclaimer.

WS Terminal is software, not investment advice

WS Terminal is a configurable software product. It is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a personalized recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, derivative, or other instrument.

W.S. Trading Co. is not registered with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (the “CFTC”) as a Commodity Trading Advisor (“CTA”), is not a member of the National Futures Association (the “NFA”), is not registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment adviser, and is not a fiduciary for any user of WS Terminal. W.S. Trading Co. operates on the basis that the impersonal-advice exemption at 17 C.F.R. § 4.14(a)(9) applies to the WS Terminal product: the software does not direct any individual customer’s account, is not tailored to any individual customer’s circumstances, and buyers configure and run the software themselves on their own brokerage accounts.

No content on this site, in the WS Terminal application, in the W.S. Trading Co. Discord, or in any other communication from W.S. Trading Co. should be interpreted as a recommendation that you enter any specific trade or that any particular trading strategy is suitable for your individual circumstances. Decisions about whether to trade, what to trade, and how much capital to commit are entirely yours. Consult a licensed financial advisor before committing capital to any automated trading system, including this one.

Futures trading involves substantial risk of loss

Trading futures and futures options is speculative, involves substantial risk of loss, and is not appropriate for all investors. You should not trade futures unless you understand the nature of the contracts you are trading, the leverage involved, and the extent of your potential exposure to loss.

Specifically, when you use WS Terminal to trade futures on your own brokerage account, you acknowledge that:

• You may lose all of the funds you have deposited in the connected brokerage account.
• In some circumstances — including but not limited to gap moves, limit-up / limit-down sessions, news-driven volatility, exchange outages, broker outages, or rapidly trending markets — you may lose more than the initial funds you deposited and become liable to the brokerage for the deficit balance.
• Stop-loss orders, take-profit orders, and other risk-management orders are designed to limit losses to certain amounts, but they do not guarantee execution at the order price. During fast or illiquid market conditions, fills may occur at materially worse prices than the order specified, or in some cases not at all.
• The leverage available in futures markets can work for and against you. Small price movements in the underlying instrument can result in large percentage gains or losses on your committed capital.
• You should only trade with risk capital — capital you can afford to lose entirely without affecting your standard of living, financial obligations, or retirement plans.

Before opening a futures account or enabling live trading in WS Terminal, review the futures-specific risk disclosures your broker is required to provide. Your broker’s risk disclosure statement supplements this disclaimer; it does not replace it.

Backtested and hypothetical performance disclosure

Any equity curve, return figure, drawdown statistic, Sharpe ratio, Calmar ratio, win rate, profit factor, or other quantitative result referenced on this site, in WS Terminal, in marketing materials, or in W.S. Trading Co. communications that is derived from backtesting, simulation, or any process other than the actual execution of trades in a real brokerage account is a hypothetical performance result and is subject to the disclaimer below.

The text below is the disclaimer prescribed by National Futures Association Compliance Rule 2-29(c)(1) and is reproduced verbatim as required by NFA Interpretive Notice 9025. It is presented here with equal prominence to any hypothetical performance result referenced elsewhere on this site or in the application.

Past performance — whether actual or hypothetical — does not guarantee or predict future results. Backtested performance is calculated by applying the strategy logic to historical market data after the fact. It does not represent orders that were actually placed, fills that were actually received, fees that were actually paid, or the psychological pressure of trading real money in real time. Even if the strategy is profitable in backtests over a given period, the same strategy may produce losses, including substantial losses, when run on your account.

Any displayed performance from W.S. Trading Co.’s own operator-managed brokerage account is the result of one individual account, traded under one specific configuration, during one specific time period. Your results will differ — potentially materially — based on your configuration, your account size, your fee structure, your execution latency, your market data, the periods during which you choose to run the bot, and many other factors.

Outages, slippage, and software failure modes

Automated trading depends on a stack of independent components, any one of which can fail. Specific failure modes you should expect over a sufficiently long operating period include:

• Broker outages. Interactive Brokers (or any other broker the software connects to) may be unavailable, partially degraded, or unable to accept orders during planned maintenance windows, unplanned outages, or post-trade reconciliation periods. WS Terminal cannot place, modify, or cancel orders during such outages.
• Market-data gaps. Real-time market data feeds can stall, disconnect, or deliver out-of-order or incorrect ticks. The bot’s FVG detection, stop-loss tracking, and take-profit tracking depend on the data feed. Stale or missing data may cause the bot to act on a market state that no longer exists, place orders into prices the market has already passed, or fail to detect setups that occurred during the gap.
• Network and power failures. An interruption of network connectivity, power to the host computer, or the IB Gateway local-process may cause the bot to lose its connection to the broker. Orders already submitted to the broker continue to live on the broker’s side; orders not yet submitted will not be placed.
• Slippage and fill quality. The price at which an order actually fills may differ from the price you intended, especially in fast, illiquid, or news-driven markets. Stop-loss orders may fill materially below their trigger price; limit orders may not fill at all.
• Exchange halts and limit-up / limit-down sessions. Futures exchanges may halt trading or impose price limits during extreme market conditions. While halted, orders cannot execute, and positions cannot be opened or closed regardless of any stop-loss configuration.
• Software defects and update behavior. WS Terminal is software, and software contains defects. Updates may introduce new defects, change configuration behavior, or interact unexpectedly with your specific operating system, broker configuration, or market environment. Test every new release in paper mode before enabling live trading on it.
• Configuration error. The bot trades the parameters you configure. A misconfigured parameter (an oversized position, a stop set too tight or too loose, an incorrect symbol, a trading window that overlaps a known high-volatility event) can produce losses that are not attributable to the strategy itself but to the configuration the operator chose.
• Unattended-operation risks. If you enable the auto-start feature with a live brokerage port, WS Terminal will arm itself for live trading every time the application launches, including after machine reboots, OS updates, or scheduled tasks, without showing you a confirmation prompt. Any of the failure modes above that occur during unattended operation may produce unintended fills, missed stops, stale positions, or other adverse outcomes for which you are responsible. A separate in-app acknowledgment is required before auto-start with live trading can be enabled.

W.S. Trading Co. does not warrant that WS Terminal will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure against attack, or capable of handling every market condition. W.S. Trading Co. is not liable for losses, missed trades, unintended fills, or other adverse outcomes attributable to any of the failure modes above. See the Trading Terms for the full limitation-of-liability clause.

You are solely responsible for what the bot does on your account

WS Terminal trades the parameters you configure, on the brokerage account you connect, during the time windows you choose, with the capital you have deposited. Every one of those decisions is yours. Specifically, you are solely responsible for:

• Your selection of strategy parameters (entry depth, stop-loss type and size, take-profit type and size, pyramid size limits, daily caps, trading windows, and every other configurable knob).
• Your choice of brokerage, brokerage account type, market-data subscriptions, and account funding level.
• Monitoring the operation of the software while it is running live, including verifying that the bot is connected, that orders are reaching the broker, that fills are being recorded correctly, and that the bot is behaving as you expect it to.
• Disabling the software, manually flattening positions, or cancelling pending orders if you observe behavior you do not want to continue, or if external conditions (planned downtime, major news events, personal circumstances) suggest that you should not be in the market.
• Maintaining the operating environment (operating-system updates, network connectivity, power, time synchronization) that WS Terminal requires to operate correctly.
• Complying with all laws, regulations, exchange rules, broker rules, and tax obligations that apply to your trading activity in your jurisdiction.

Before WS Terminal will place any live orders on your behalf, you are required to complete an in-application live-trading acknowledgment. Your acknowledgment is recorded to W.S. Trading Co.’s audit log along with a timestamp, your IP address, your user agent, the brokerage port you were connected to, the list of clauses you accepted, the software version, and a SHA-256 hash of the canonical acknowledgment text. That record is retained for at least seven (7) years following the expiration or termination of your license.

Where the rest of the contract lives

This disclaimer supplements, and is supplemented by, the other legal documents governing your use of WS Terminal:

• Terms of Service — license grant, permitted and prohibited use, intellectual property, subscription and billing, warranty disclaimers, and termination.
• Trading Terms — trading-specific limitation of liability, binding arbitration and class-action waiver, governing law, and the cross-reference back to the in-application acknowledgments.
• Privacy Policy — what information W.S. Trading Co. collects, how it is stored, how long it is retained, and your rights with respect to it.
• Refund Policy — when refunds are and are not available.
• In-application live-trading acknowledgment — the click-through modal WS Terminal presents before the first live-trading session on each version of the software. The canonical text is shown to you in the application at the time of consent and recorded to the audit log.

Where this disclaimer and the in-application acknowledgment describe the same risk, both apply — the in-application acknowledgment does not narrow this disclaimer, and this disclaimer does not narrow the in-application acknowledgment.

How updates are surfaced

W.S. Trading Co. may revise this disclaimer at any time. Material revisions — new categories of risk disclosed, changes to the hypothetical-performance disclaimer text, or changes to the operator-responsibility allocation — will be surfaced in WS Terminal as a re-acknowledgment prompt before the next live-trading session. Non-material revisions (typo fixes, reformatting, clarifying examples) will be surfaced via the “Last updated” date at the top of this page.

Continuing to use WS Terminal after a revised disclaimer is posted constitutes your acceptance of the revised disclaimer.