Tradier returns total_equity 0.0 during its overnight maintenance window --
sixteen times in the last fourteen days, all around 01:06. Three defects
compounded so that a zero could size a position off default_equity:
account_equity = equity or config.default_equity
`or` cannot tell "not supplied" from "read as zero", so a real 0.0 became
100000. Then the position-value cap, derived from the same equity, was
itself 0 -- and the guard
if max_position_value is not None and max_position_value > 0:
SKIPPED the cap precisely when the cap said "no room". Finally the auto
path (~96% of approval requests) had no `pos_cap <= 0` early-out, unlike
the manual path at request_entry_approval. Net effect on a ~$250 account:
risk 5% of 100k = $5,000, capped only by liquidity. The broker would have
rejected it for buying power, which is luck rather than design.
Never fired in live hours -- every zero read landed with the market closed,
and _current_equity caches the last good value -- so this is latent, not a
realised loss. The reachable path is a boot that coincides with the
maintenance window, when no good read has been cached yet.
Distinguish None from zero, refuse to size on non-positive equity, treat a
zero cap as "no room" rather than "no cap", and mirror the manual path's
early-out. TRADING_DEFAULT_EQUITY is set to 300 on the live stack so even
the untested fallback cannot oversize.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01A2LepdJfPCfK5Q8uznjFBM
