Hold Through is a toggle on a strategy's Copy Trade tab. It changes one thing, and only one thing: what happens to the spreads you copy from that shot caller.

• Off (the default) — every spread you copy gets your own take-profit and stop-loss brackets, just like any other trade.
• On — spreads open with a take-profit only and no stop-loss at all. They stay open until the shot caller closes them, until the spread can be bought back for about a penny, or until they expire.

Single-leg trades from the same source are untouched either way — they keep your normal brackets.

Why anyone would turn off a stop-loss

This sounds reckless until you know how a sold spread behaves.

When a shot caller sells a credit spread, they're being paid up front and betting the spread expires worthless. The thing is, a spread that's going to end up worthless very often looks terrible in the middle of its life. The underlying wanders toward the strikes, the spread's quoted price balloons, and then it drains back to nothing as expiration approaches. That round trip is normal, and it's the whole trade.

A stop-loss can't tell that apart from a losing trade. It fires at the ugliest point — usually near the maximum loss — and takes you out of a position that was on its way to a full win.

Example

The shot caller sells a $5-wide put spread on SPX for a $1.00 credit. Two days later the market dips and the spread is quoted at $3.80. With a normal stop-loss you'd have been taken out there for a large loss. The market steadies over the next three days, the spread expires worthless, and the shot caller keeps the entire $1.00 credit. With Hold Through on, so do you.

Your loss is still capped

Turning off the stop-loss does not mean unlimited risk. A spread has a built-in maximum loss: the distance between its two strikes, minus the credit received. That ceiling exists in the structure of the trade itself, and it's there whether or not you have a stop.

In the example above, the worst possible outcome is the $5 width minus the $1.00 credit — $4.00 per spread — and that's true with Hold Through on or off.

Warning

Cap or no cap, that maximum is a real number and you should be comfortable with it before turning this on. Size these positions on what you could lose at the ceiling, not on the credit you collect. Your daily Killswitch limits still apply and will still stop the strategy for the day.

How it interacts with your other settings

• Your take-profit and stop-loss sliders stay on screen, and a note appears next to them explaining that they no longer apply to this source's spreads. They still apply in full to any single-leg trade from the same source.
• Exit legs still split the position. If you use Multi-Leg Exits, the legs continue to decide how the position is divided — which is what lets the shot caller close part of it — but each slice gets the same buy-back-for-a-penny target and no stop, instead of its own percentages.
• Trailing stops don't apply. A trailing stop is a stop-loss, so there's nothing for it to do on a held-through spread.
• You can still close by hand at any time. The Close button on the trade card, and Flatten All, both work exactly as normal.

Where the toggle is — and why you might not see it

Hold Through only appears when three things are true at once:

1. The shot caller has opted in to offering it on that source.
2. Your strategy is set to mirror their exits — that is, the source sends both entry and exit signals rather than entry only.
3. Your bot is a recent enough version to support it.

If any of those isn't true, the toggle isn't shown, because the setting would have nothing to act on. It's saved per strategy, so you can run one strategy holding through and another with normal brackets on the same source.

Tip

If you're not sure, leave it off. Off is the ordinary behavior, and it's the setting that keeps a stop-loss under every trade. Turn it on once you've watched a few of that source's spreads run their full course and you understand the shape of them.