Time Stop

A time stop closes a position after a defined period regardless of price — at the end of the session, after a set number of bars, or before a scheduled event. Unlike a price stop, which answers how much you are willing to lose, a time stop answers how long you are willing to have capital committed to an idea that has not worked yet. The usual rationale is that a setup was formed on an expectation about a timeframe, so a position that has neither reached its target nor been stopped out within that window is no longer the trade that was entered. It also caps exposure to overnight gaps, weekend risk and swap costs. Most platforms do not offer it as a native order type, so it is generally implemented in a script or applied manually.