In essence that's what I have done.. my program is automated so I used the account values endpoint that pulls up what you see as the account management window. I grabbed cash balance and net liquidity, and save it to a csv. When I run my program it finds the csv, and the static snapshot, of the cashbalance and netliquidity as it was before the market opened. during the day if the system buys cash balance goes down.. I have a rule if i spend beyond a specific amount the system shuts down.
@N2M Don't know if I agree with completely shutting the system down, but its your system to run according to your particular rules, so who am I to judge? My system is a longer term system, on days like last Friday and today it just continues to run. The system will decide when to get out of positions, or to reverse into new ones. KH
With the specifics of my system, im aware of how many buys should happen, when that number is surpassed, something is wrong.. I ran into this issue with a simple syntax error, where invalid trades were being placed repeatedly, i was able to save 50% of my cash but i did learn a valuable lesson.. If my system spends too much, something is wrong, Im shutting down, to survive.