Reference
Glossary
Definitions of the terms this system uses — drawdown, spread, slippage, lot, proposal, ratchet, blackout — in the specific sense Helios uses them.
Last reviewed: 25 August 2026
About these definitions
Several of these words are used loosely across the trading industry. The definitions here are the sense this system uses, which is occasionally narrower than the common one — “profit sharing” in particular means a fee on net profit for a billing month, and nothing else.
How this system is organised
- Agent
- The language-model component that reads market context and produces proposals. It has no broker connection and no ability to execute anything.
- Execution engine
- The only component permitted to send an order to your broker, and only for a proposal the risk engine has already approved.
- Gateway
- The Expert Advisor running on your MetaTrader 5 terminal. Carries prices out and order commands in, and holds no strategy of its own.
- Position management
- The C++ component that owns a trade after it opens, applying break-even, the profit ratchet, partial close and emergency exit on every tick.
- Proposal
- A structured request to open a trade, carrying a symbol, direction, size, levels and a confidence score. A request, not an instruction.
- Risk engine
- The deterministic C++ component that checks every proposal against the hard limits and decides whether it may exist. Compiled code, not a prompt.
Risk and account terms
- Drawdown
- The decline from an account equity peak to its subsequent low, as a percentage. Max drawdown is the limit past which no new entries are permitted.
- Equity
- Account balance plus the unrealized profit or loss of open positions. Risk limits are measured against equity, not balance, because equity is what you would actually have if everything closed now.
- Leverage
- The multiple by which your broker lets you control a position larger than your deposit. It magnifies gains and losses equally, which is why the loss limits on this system exist.
- Lot
- The standard unit of position size in MetaTrader 5. What one lot is worth differs by instrument, which is why size limits are set per account and checked against margin.
- Margin
- The deposit your broker holds against an open position. A proposal that would leave insufficient free margin is rejected.
- Net profit
- Profit after losing trades are subtracted, for a billing month. The performance fee is charged on this, not on balance or turnover.
Market and execution terms
- ATR (average true range)
- A measure of how much an instrument typically moves over a period. Used here as the basis of the volatility circuit breaker.
- Blackout window
- A period in which new positions are refused — daily rollover, the weekend close, or around a scheduled high-impact release. Open positions continue to be managed.
- Gap
- A jump from one price to another with no trading in between, typically over a weekend or on news. Gaps are how a resting stop fills materially worse than its level.
- Slippage
- The difference between the price you expected and the price you got. A stop level is an instruction to trade at the next available price, not a promise of that price.
- Spread
- The gap between the bid and ask price — the immediate cost of a round trip. Proposals arriving while the spread is above its configured ceiling are rejected.
- Stale data
- A price older than the freshness limit. The system rejects proposals on stale symbols rather than acting on a price that may no longer exist.
Position management terms
- Break-even
- Moving the resting stop to the entry price once a trade is modestly ahead, so it can no longer become a losing position at the broker.
- Emergency exit
- A hard stop on unrealized loss per position, evaluated before every other rule and independently of the AI layer.
- Partial close
- Closing part of a position at a configured profit, reducing the size at risk while leaving the remainder to run.
- Profit ratchet
- A resting broker-side stop that steps up behind peak profit and, once armed, never sits at a losing level. Expressed in basis points so it works across instruments of different price scales.
- Trailing stop
- A stop that follows price at a fixed distance. Shipped disabled here, because a fixed price distance is not meaningful across instruments — the ratchet replaces it.