What leverage does and does not do
Leverage multiplies the return of an edge and the loss of a mistake by the same factor. It does not create edge. A strategy with no positive expectancy levered ten times is a strategy that loses money ten times faster, and the availability of 50:1 or 500:1 says something about the broker's business model rather than about the opportunity.
The arithmetic of recovery
A 50% drawdown requires a 100% gain to recover. A 20% drawdown requires 25%. The asymmetry is why volatility targeting — sizing so that expected loss is constant rather than position size being constant — is the standard approach among desks that survive multiple decades rather than one good year.
The one thing to automate first
Before any signal logic, a hard, unbypassable limit on total exposure and daily loss, enforced in code that the strategy cannot override. It is the least interesting component to build and the only one whose absence is unrecoverable.