Pair Filtering

Before TradeSmith even evaluates its technical indicator conditions, it runs each potential trading pair through a series of filters. These filters determine eligibility — whether a pair is even considered as a candidate for a new trade. Pair filtering is your first line of defence against illiquid tokens, overtraded pairs, and capital overextension.

Blacklist

The blacklist is a permanent exclusion list. Any pair added to the blacklist will never be traded by TradingForge, regardless of what any indicator or signal says. The blacklist takes priority over all other settings.

When to Blacklist a Pair

• ›Newly listed tokens: New tokens have no price history, unpredictable volatility, and often experience extreme pump-and-dump behavior in the first days or weeks after listing.
• ›Low-cap, illiquid tokens: Small market cap tokens can be easily manipulated and may have very low liquidity despite appearing on the exchange.
• ›Pairs with known issues: Tokens undergoing protocol issues, security audits, or team controversies.
• ›Pairs that performed poorly in backtesting: Any pair that consistently triggered safety orders without recovery in your testing.

Managing the Blacklist

Navigate to Settings → TradeSmith → Blacklist to add or remove pairs. Enter the pair symbol exactly as it appears on your exchange (e.g. PEPE/USDT). Changes take effect immediately on the next analysis cycle — any pairs currently being analyzed for entry will be skipped if they are added to the blacklist.

Whitelist

The whitelist is an opt-in approved trading list. When a whitelist is defined and enabled, TradingForge only trades pairs that appear on it. Any pair not on the whitelist is treated as if it were blacklisted.

Using a whitelist is the recommended approach for most traders. It gives you complete control over which assets you are exposed to and prevents the system from automatically picking up new pairs added to your exchange that you have not yet evaluated.

Whitelist vs No Whitelist

Managing the Whitelist

Navigate to Settings → TradeSmith → Whitelist to manage your approved pairs. Add pairs one at a time or import a comma-separated list. The whitelist and blacklist can coexist — a pair on the whitelist that is also on the blacklist will be excluded (blacklist wins).

Volume Filter

The volume filter automatically excludes any pair whose 24-hour trading volume falls below a configured minimum threshold. This prevents TradingForge from trading illiquid pairs where your orders may cause significant slippage or where the spread between bid and ask prices is too wide.

Why Volume Matters

In an illiquid market, a relatively small order can move the price. If TradeFuel tries to place a safety order on a pair with 50,000 USDT daily volume, the order itself might represent a meaningful fraction of all activity and fill at a significantly worse price than expected. This erodes your calculated profit margins.

Setting the Volume Filter

Navigate to Settings → TradeSmith → Filters and set the min_volume_24h value in USDT. The recommendation for most users is 500,000 USDT as a starting point, with adjustment based on the typical size of your orders.

Market Cap Filter

If supported by your connected exchange's API, TradeSmith can filter out pairs below a minimum market capitalization. Market cap provides a rough proxy for the maturity and stability of an asset — higher market cap assets have more liquidity, more institutional participation, and historically show more reliable recovery behavior.

• ›Navigate to Settings → TradeSmith → Filters to configure
• ›Set a minimum market cap in USD (e.g. 100 million, 500 million, 1 billion)
• ›Exchange API support for market cap data varies — check your exchange's capabilities

Pair Cooldown

A cooldown period prevents TradingForge from immediately re-entering a pair after a trade closes. After the take profit fires and the position is closed, the pair is placed in a cooldown state for the configured duration. No new trades on that pair can be opened until the cooldown expires.

Why Use Cooldowns

• ›After a big move that triggered multiple safety orders and eventually recovered, the pair may be in an uncertain state. A cooldown gives the market time to stabilize before re-entry.
• ›Prevents rapid re-entry into a pair that just finished a long, difficult DCA cycle — which might be the start of a sustained downtrend rather than a one-off dip.
• ›Useful for managing exposure to a single pair across multiple trade cycles per day.

Cooldown Configuration

Cooldowns can be set globally (applies to all pairs) or per-pair (specific pairs have their own cooldown duration). Navigate to Settings → TradeSmith → Cooldowns to configure.

Max Active Trades

Max active trades is a global cap on the total number of simultaneously open DCA positions across all pairs. When this limit is reached, TradeSmith will not allow any new positions to open — even if all indicator conditions are favorable — until an existing position closes.

Why This Matters for Capital Management

Each open DCA trade has a theoretical maximum capital requirement (base + all SOs). If every active trade simultaneously hits its worst-case scenario, you need enough capital to cover all of them. The max active trades setting ensures you don't overextend.

Example: Moderate profile with ~1,369 USDT worst-case per trade. With a 5,000 USDT account, you should set max active trades to 3 at most (3 × 1,369 = 4,107 USDT), leaving a cash buffer. Setting it to 5 would require 6,845 USDT — more than your account holds.