What Is an Order Approval Gate?
An order approval gate is a hard checkpoint that requires your explicit, one-by-one approval before any trade is placed — no setup, however confident the probability, ever fires on its own. On Trading Tavern, this isn't a setting you can turn off. There is no autopilot mode.
How it works
When a setup clears our screening and gets a calibrated probability estimate, it shows up as a suggestion — not an executed trade. You see the setup, the probability, the suggested quarter-Kelly position size, and the reasoning behind it. Nothing happens to your account, paper or live, until you personally review it and hit approve. Decline it, and it simply doesn't happen.
How this differs from "smart" auto-trading apps
A lot of trading apps market themselves as "set it and forget it" — the algorithm decides, the algorithm executes, you just watch the account balance. That model has real appeal (less to think about) but it also means:
- You can be sized into a position you never actually looked at.
- A bug, a bad data feed, or a model failure can execute real trades before a human notices anything's wrong.
- You lose the habit of understanding why a trade is happening — which matters a lot when it eventually goes wrong.
Trading Tavern deliberately doesn't work that way. Every probability estimate is a research input for you to evaluate, not an instruction being carried out on your behalf.
Why we built it this way
Part of it is philosophy: we don't think a research tool should also be the one pulling the trigger. Part of it is accountability: because every trade requires your active approval, there's no ambiguity about who made the call, and no "the algorithm did it" excuse if a probability call doesn't pan out — which, per the Truth Meter, some of them won't. A well-calibrated 65% probability is still wrong 35% of the time, by design.
For the full mechanics of how a setup moves from screening to probability to your approval screen, see How It Works.