The four honest failure modes
Losses 3–5 of the day. The revenge trade at 14:47. Size creep on a green day. Trading the wrong session. These are the trades that kill accounts.
Ask a hundred traders what killed their last funded account and ninety-five will describe one of four scenarios. Not the C+ setup they skipped. Not the missed rally they didn't have positions for. The four A- setups they never should have taken.
Below is the equity curve of a typical Tuesday session for a disciplined trader — with and without a hard rules layer. Same trader, same setups, same market. The difference is which trades make it to the click.
Every discipline feature in Sentio is designed to make one of the four moments below physically harder. Not to nudge. Not to remind. To remove the button.
1. Losses 3–5 of the day
You've lost three times. You broke your own daily-cap rule at trade #3 because "the setup was too clean to skip." Now you're taking trades 4 and 5 in size, because you have to make it back before the close.
The daily-cap gate fires at trade 3. The scanner stops surfacing new setups until tomorrow. The decision dialog is muted. There's no willpower fight because the alert never arrives on your screen.
2. The revenge trade at 14:47
Stopped out at 14:41. You're staring at the chart, breathing hard, telling yourself you're fine. Sixteen minutes later you're double-size in the opposite direction, chasing the move that should have been yours.
The trade you would have taken at 14:47 was arithmetically the same setup as one you'd have skipped on a calm morning. The difference isn't the setup — it's you.
3. Size creep on a green day
Two wins in. Suddenly the 2-lot feels small. You go 4. That's the one that gives it all back, often more.
The sizing engine locks to your MAX RISK cap per trade. It doesn't care how good you felt about the last two. Every setup gets sized against the same stop distance, the same account cap. Discipline enforced at the arithmetic level, not the willpower level.
4. Trading the wrong session
Your win rate on 2pm–4pm is terrible and you know it. But you're bored, the market is quiet elsewhere, and there's an "obvious" setup on your screen.
Per-model time-window mutes. Mute Unicorn between 14:00 and 16:00 ET. Setups on that model don't just get their alerts silenced — the setup is never added to the scanner during those hours. Boredom stays boredom.
The common thread
Look at the four modes side by side. None of them are about failing to find good trades. They're all about failing to not take bad ones. That's the design insight the whole discipline layer is built around.
A better scanner doesn't help you if the trade that kills you is the one you took after the scanner was silent. You need the tool to go dark — to actively refuse to surface anything — in the moments when your judgment is the least trustworthy. That's what discipline means in code: the setup doesn't reach your eyes when your rules say it shouldn't.
See how the discipline layer is composed, or read how the layer works internally.