Operator stop and kill switch

There are two ways to stop a running instance, and they do opposite things with your money. Stop ends the strategy and leaves the position alone. Kill closes it and stops everything on live. Both are yours to press at any moment.

Stop: the strategy ends, the position stays

Stop is an operator stop. It does not flatten:

• The position and its protective stop and take-profit stay exactly as they are on the venue, so a stop sits between the strategy and the market until you close it yourself.
• Only the strategy's own resting entry orders are cancelled, so nothing new opens while you are away.
• The instance log states it plainly, in the line stop: NOT flattening (operator stop).

This is the stop for a discretionary or guardian strategy: start it, let it manage its stops, stop it, and the trade keeps its protection.

A stop the system makes for you is different

A terminal stop does flatten, closes the position and cancels its orders: a trading refusal, an error it cannot recover from, the strategy calling its own stop, or the end of a replay. It then reports account verified FLAT.

On a live account that line is only printed while the engine has no live position for the instance. While it still holds one, an empty position book can be a stale copy of the venue, so the stop prints [flat-unconfirmed] with a reminder to check the venue by hand, and leaves every protective and entry order in place rather than claim a flat it cannot prove.

An operator stop is never undone

Stopping an instance cancels a pending restart, even while a crash backoff is waiting, and the instance stays stopped. Nothing in the licence, the terms screen or a limit can block a stop, a close, a flatten or the kill switch, and neither can a quota: those actions and reading results are always allowed.

Kill switch: flat and stopped

The KILL button, a power icon with the word KILL, is the emergency stop. It acts on live and demo instances only, and paper instances are never touched. Pressing it and confirming does this for every live and demo instance:

• Blocks new orders on the instance.
• Cancels every open order on that instance's coin on that account: the entries, the take-profit and stop legs, and any order the app did not place itself, such as a hand-placed reduce-only take-profit. Orders on other coins are untouched.
• Closes the position reduce-only, then checks the venue: the position must read zero and no order may be open.
• Stops the instance and marks it killed. It does not restart by itself, and rotation and the daily selection do not bring it back. You start it again by hand.

The confirm text says all of this in plain words before you press it, and the answer afterwards lists what happened to each instance or what failed. The notice reads "Kill switch: N of N live instances flat and stopped" only when that is true, and a failed instance is named in red. If an instance's process cannot be reached, the engine still cancels its orders and closes its position directly on the venue. The kill's own closing fill is logged with the reason "Kill switch close".

Which one to use

• You want the strategy's logic out of the way and the trade to keep its stop: stop the instance.
• You want everything on live flat now: the kill switch.
• You want one position closed and nothing else: the close position control, which leaves the instance running.

For the bracket that survives a stop, and for where stops are set, see Stops, take-profit and brackets.