Risk disclosure

This document outlines material risks associated with using the Vectra software service to trade financial instruments. It is not exhaustive. Read it carefully before connecting a live broker. By using the Service for live trading you acknowledge you have read, understood, and accepted the risks described below.

1. General trading risk

All trading involves risk of loss. The value of any financial instrument can fall as well as rise. Markets can gap suddenly, become illiquid, or halt entirely without notice in response to news, macroeconomic events, or exchange-level decisions. You may lose some or all of your invested capital. You should only trade with capital you can afford to lose entirely.

Past performance — including audited backtests, paper-trading results, and any live track record reported by Vectra — is not a reliable indicator of future performance. Different market regimes produce different outcomes, and historical regimes may not recur.

2. Algorithmic-specific risk

Automated trading systems carry risks that do not arise (or arise differently) in discretionary trading:

• Latency. The time between a signal being generated and an order reaching the venue depends on network and broker conditions outside our control. Excessive latency can produce stale fills or missed entries.
• Slippage. The price at which an order fills may differ from the price at which the signal was generated, especially in fast or thin markets, around news events, and at the open / close of regular trading sessions.
• Software defects. Despite testing, code may contain bugs that produce unexpected orders, fail to close positions, or misreport state. We aim to fail-safe (preferring to halt rather than to over-trade) but cannot guarantee correctness.
• Fail-safe modes. The Service includes kill-switches, circuit-breakers, and pause-on-error behaviour. These may be triggered by transient conditions and may halt trading at inopportune moments. Conversely, they may fail to trigger when expected.
• Model decay. Strategies tuned on historical data may degrade as market microstructure evolves. Vectra periodically retrains and re-validates, but there is no guarantee that the deployed strategy will remain profitable.

3. Margin and leverage risk

Several markets supported by the Service permit leverage (notably crypto perpetual futures and FX margin). Leverage magnifies both gains and losses. In leveraged or margined accounts you may lose more than your initial deposit, and you may be required by your broker to post additional margin on short notice.

Adverse price movement can trigger forced liquidation by the exchange or broker, often at the worst possible price. Funding-rate accrual on perpetual contracts may erode profits independently of price action. Margin requirements can change without notice.

4. Asset-class risk

4.1 Cryptocurrency and crypto derivatives

Crypto markets exhibit extreme volatility. Daily moves of ±20% or more are not unusual. Liquidity can evaporate in seconds; spreads can widen by orders of magnitude during stress. Exchange counterparty risk is material — exchanges have failed, frozen withdrawals, or imposed unscheduled maintenance. Regulatory action can render specific tokens or entire venues inaccessible without notice.

4.2 Equities

Equity markets are subject to overnight gaps that strategies operating on intraday data cannot react to. Earnings announcements, M&A activity, halts, and circuit breakers can all cause large discontinuous moves. Dividends, splits, and corporate actions affect prices and may produce unexpected fills if not reflected in real-time data.

4.3 Foreign exchange

FX markets are 24×5 and are exposed to central-bank intervention, geopolitical events, and rate-decision announcements that can produce sudden multi-percent moves. Currency pairs are highly correlated; an apparently diversified FX portfolio may have concentrated risk under stress. Carry trades may unwind violently.

5. Backtest-vs-live performance gap

Backtests and paper-trading results have inherent limitations. They are constructed with the benefit of hindsight, do not involve real financial risk, and cannot fully account for:

• Slippage at the size traded (especially in thin markets or during fast moves);
• Bid/ask spread paid on entry and exit;
• Order rejections, partial fills, and re-quotes;
• Survivorship bias in the underlying data set;
• Look-ahead bias from data that was not actually available at the simulated decision time;
• Funding, borrow, swap, and financing costs that vary over time;
• Market impact of the strategy itself trading at scale;
• The psychological impact of real losses on operator-facing decisions.

Live performance therefore typically differs — sometimes materially — from backtested performance even when the strategy code is identical. Per NFA Rule 2-29(c) considerations, no representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to those shown.

6. System and infrastructure risk

• Broker outages. Connected brokers and exchanges experience scheduled maintenance and unscheduled downtime. While they are unavailable, no orders can be placed, modified, or cancelled — including stops.
• Exchange halts. Equity exchanges may impose trading halts on individual symbols or marketwide (e.g. limit-up / limit-down or circuit breakers). During a halt, no fills are possible regardless of strategy signals.
• Internet and hosting failures.Network disruptions between Vectra's hosting and broker APIs may delay or prevent order placement.
• Kill-switch behaviour. The Service halts trading when configured risk thresholds are breached (drawdown, error rate, account-balance sanity). It does not flatten open positions automatically — you remain responsible for managing positions during a halt.
• Data quality. Market data feeds occasionally produce bad ticks, stale prices, or missing bars. Strategy decisions made on degraded data may be wrong.
• Time synchronisation. Clock drift between Vectra, the data feed, and the broker can produce signature mismatches or rejected orders.

7. Tax responsibility

You are solely responsible for determining the tax treatment of your trading activity, calculating gains and losses, and filing required returns in every applicable jurisdiction. Vectra does not provide tax advice and the trade history exposed by the Service is provided for your record-keeping convenience only — it is not a tax document. Tax treatment of crypto, derivatives, and FX varies substantially by jurisdiction and may change. Consult a qualified tax professional.

8. Regulatory change

The legal and regulatory landscape for algorithmic trading, cryptocurrency, derivatives, and cross-border financial services is evolving rapidly. New laws, regulations, or enforcement actions in your jurisdiction or in the jurisdictions of your Connected Account brokers may, with little or no notice, restrict or prohibit some or all of the activity the Service performs on your behalf. You may be required to liquidate positions, change brokers, or cease using the Service entirely as a result. Vectra is under no obligation to maintain support for any particular market, instrument, broker, or jurisdiction and may discontinue any of the foregoing at its sole discretion.

Not legal advice. Consult qualified counsel in your operating jurisdiction before making trading decisions.