Does Arthalab Hold My Money? How Custody Actually Works

No. Your funds stay in your own broker account at all times. Arthalab sends order instructions to your broker; it never takes custody of your capital, and it has no mechanism to move money out of your account.

Who holds what

Party	Holds	Can do
Your broker	Your funds and positions	Everything you authorise, including withdrawals you initiate
The exchange	The contracts themselves	Settlement and clearing
Arthalab	Nothing of yours except encrypted API credentials	Send order instructions through your broker's API
You	The account	Everything

The third row is the whole answer. A trading platform is software that constructs and sends orders. Your money is somewhere else entirely, in a relationship between you and your broker.

What API access actually permits

An API key can place, modify and cancel orders, and read your positions and balance. It cannot withdraw funds, change your bank details or transfer securities.

Money leaves a broker account through a separate and more heavily protected channel that API credentials do not reach. That distinction is structural rather than a policy choice, and it is the same across brokers.

What a platform can do, and why that still matters

Being accurate about the risk that does exist is more useful than reassurance.

A platform with your API credentials can place orders in your account. A badly built one could place wrong orders; a compromised one could place deliberate ones. Neither takes your money directly, and both could cause losses.

Why the setup requirements exist

This is why IP whitelisting and daily session expiry exist, and why they are worth setting up properly rather than treating as friction.

What this means for payments

Two separate money flows, and conflating them causes confusion.

Flow	Goes where	Handled by
Your subscription	To Arthalab	A payment gateway
Your trading capital	Stays in your broker account	Your broker

The subscription is a normal software payment. Your trading capital never moves to Arthalab at any point and there is no mechanism by which it could.

Questions worth asking any platform

Does the platform ever hold client funds?
What exactly does its broker access permit?
Are credentials encrypted at rest and never displayed back?
Is there a kill switch that stops all order placement?
What happens to my positions if the platform goes down?

That last question is the one most worth asking and least often answered.

What happens if the platform is unavailable

Your positions are in your broker account, so they continue to exist independently of any platform.

What stops is new automated action — a strategy that would have exited at its exit time may not do so. This is a real operational risk and it is a different risk from losing money held by someone else.

The fallback that always works

The practical implication: know how to square off directly through your broker. That is the fallback, and it works regardless of what any platform is doing.

The emergency control

Separately from your broker fallback, there is a platform-level force stop that blocks all order placement for your account regardless of what any strategy decides.

It is worth knowing where it is before you need it. An emergency control you have to find during an emergency is not much use.

The short version

Your funds stay in your broker account at all times
API access permits orders and reading, never withdrawals
The subscription and your trading capital are entirely separate flows
A platform can place wrong orders, which is why whitelisting and daily expiry exist
Positions survive platform downtime — know how to square off through your broker
Find the force stop before you need it

Frequently asked questions

No. Your funds stay in your own broker account at all times. Arthalab sends order instructions through your broker's API and has no mechanism to move money.

No. API access covers placing, modifying and cancelling orders and reading positions. Withdrawals go through a separate channel that API credentials do not reach.

It can place orders in your account. A badly built or compromised platform could place wrong ones, which could cause losses. That is why IP whitelisting and daily session expiry exist.

To Arthalab, through a payment gateway. It is entirely separate from your trading capital, which never moves.

They remain in your broker account. What stops is new automated action, including a scheduled exit. Know how to square off directly through your broker as a fallback.

Yes. A platform-level force stop blocks all order placement for your account regardless of what any strategy decides. Find it before you need it.

Ask how they are stored. They should be encrypted at rest, never displayed back in the interface, and never requested over chat or email. A platform asking for your broker password rather than API credentials is a reason to stop.

They remain in your broker account, because that is where they always were. What stops is the automation managing them, so square off or take over manually before you cancel.

No. The broker API is used to place orders in your account. Moving money in or out is done by you, through your broker, and no platform credential enables it.

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