Auto-Sync is the unattended daily run of the broker connectors. It triggers at 04:30 UTC every day, walks through every active connection on your account, and incremental-fetches the fills posted since the last sync. New closed trades land in Trades, the Calendar lights up where you traded, and Overview + Briefing see updated numbers the next morning.
The toggle lives at the top of Settings → Brokers. Default-on for every user. When you flip it off, the daily cron skips your account entirely — no fills are pulled and the connection's `last sync` timestamp is not advanced. That last bit matters: when you re-enable the toggle later, the next run picks up everything that arrived in the meantime, with the usual 12-hour overlap window so late-posted trades never slip through.
Manual `Sync now` is unaffected. The button on every broker card runs the same connector code path — explicit click means explicit consent, the toggle doesn't gate it. So you can opt out of the daily run and still sync whenever you want with one click.
- Default-on is the right default — most traders want their journal current the moment they open it, no extra steps.
- Off ≠ broken — turning it off is a normal mode, used when you want full control over when the connector runs.
- Three reasons to turn it off: testing a fresh connection (don't pull half-real history into your stats), API rate-limit concerns on a heavy-volume account, or pure preference for hands-on workflow.
- last_sync_at frozen on opt-out — re-enabling later resumes from where you stopped, no gaps, no data loss.
- Per-user, not per-connection — the flag governs all your connections at once. We don't split it finer because the gain is small and the UI complexity is real.
- Manual sync is the always-available escape hatch — even with the toggle off, one click on `Sync now` runs the full connector pipeline.
Most traders never touch this toggle — they connect a broker, the daily run keeps their journal current, and the only time they think about sync is when they open `Trades` and notice today's fills are already in. That's the intended steady state.
The toggle earns its keep in two situations. First, testing a new broker connection: you've just plugged in API keys for an account you're not sure about. Turn the daily run off, click `Sync now` once to verify the connector pulls the right data, then either commit (toggle back on) or disconnect. Without the toggle, the very first cron run would drop a year of historical fills you might not want yet.
Second, API rate-limit pressure. A trader running a heavy-volume Binance account who already pulls market data hard during the session may want the cron to stay out of their way. Turn it off, sync manually after the session closes — the rate-limit ceiling stays clear of your trading hours. Either way, the journal still gets up to date; you just choose when.