Read this before you ask Pascal to trade anything for you.
Pascal does not promise returns.
Pascal does not promise profitability.
Pascal promises only that it will do exactly what it says it will do.
— § 0 · the honest opening —
§ 1Market risk
Cryptocurrency, and the other markets Pascal will expand into, are volatile. You can lose capital — sometimes quickly, sometimes in ways no historical analogue prepared anyone for.
Pascal's per-trade stop-loss architecture limits how much a single position can lose. It does not eliminate the risk of cumulative loss across many trades, and it does not eliminate the risk of a single market event large enough to gap through every stop in the system.
§ 2Paper mode · live capital
Pascal currently operates in paper mode for non-founding-cohort users. Paper mode is a faithful simulation of Pascal's selector, strategies, and governance against real market data.
What paper mode cannot perfectly capture: slippage on execution, exchange downtime, order-book thinness at the moment your order arrives, the psychological pressure of watching real money move. Live deployment opens by invitation only, and the conditions of live capital differ from paper mode in ways Pascal will disclose at activation.
§ 3Architectural risk
Software has bugs. Even disciplined software has bugs that nobody noticed until the day the market produced the input that exposed them.
Pascal's governance layer — the Tier-7 supervisors and the Tier-8 Board — is engineered to catch architectural drift before it reaches your account. When the regime detector cannot classify what it is seeing, the Treasury throttles to COOLDOWN and the position lifecycle pauses. This is the design. It does not guarantee absence of loss; it is a discipline of refusal rather than improvisation.
§ 4Exchange risk
The exchange holding your capital is a counterparty risk independent of Pascal. Pascal does not vet exchanges for solvency on your behalf. You select which exchange to use, you maintain the relationship, and the soundness of that exchange is yours to evaluate.
Exchange downtime, API throttling, maintenance windows, or sudden delisting can prevent Pascal from executing or closing positions in the moment they would otherwise have acted.
§ 5Strategy mismatch
Pascal's strategies are tuned to specific market regimes — trending, ranging, accumulation, distribution, volatile transition. If the live market produces a regime Pascal has not encountered in its training, the selector defaults to COOLDOWN rather than improvise.
This means Pascal will sometimes sit out conditions in which other systems trade. It is not a bug. It is the architecture refusing to operate where it has no calibrated edge.
§ 6Not investment advice
Nothing Pascal produces — entry notifications, exit notes, weekly summaries, the interpretation layer's commentary — constitutes investment advice, securities recommendations, or a solicitation to trade. Pascal is software that executes pre-defined strategies and explains what it did.
The decisions about whether to use Pascal at all, on which exchange, with what capital, and at what tier of exposure, are yours.
§ 7Regulatory status
Pascal does not hold an investment-services licence and does not need one because it does not perform regulated activities. Pascal does not custody funds, does not broker trades on behalf of others, does not advise on investments, and does not manage a fund.
(This characterisation is under regulated-counsel review as part of the v0.1 drafting cycle. If counsel concludes Pascal's architecture crosses into a regulated perimeter, this section and the operating model will be amended accordingly before public launch.)
§ 8Tax
You are responsible for tax on gains generated through your account. Pascal does not provide tax advice and does not file on your behalf.
Alexandria's record of every decision Pascal made on your account is available to you, in full, to assist your own filings and your own accountant's work.
§ 9Limit your exposure
Do not deploy capital you cannot afford to lose. Size positions relative to your overall wealth, not relative to what Pascal showed in paper mode. Consult a regulated financial adviser if anything about your circumstances is uncertain.
Pascal is built for principals who understand that markets pay nothing for hope and everything for discipline. The discipline is yours to bring; Pascal supplies the execution.
What Pascal does, it will do clearly. What Pascal cannot promise, it will not promise.
This document is a working draft. Final legal text will be ratified by regulated counsel before public launch. The substantive principles above reflect Pascal's intended posture.