Pause
Stops new proposals being acted on. Existing positions keep their protective exits and can still be closed. This is the lever for "I want to look at something before anything else happens".
Controls
Stopping is afirst-class action
Most trading software treats "stop" as an afterthought bolted onto "start". Three separate levers here mean three different things, and none of them can trap you in a position.
The three levers
They are separate because "do not open anything new" and "do nothing at all" are different instructions, and conflating them is how an operator ends up unable to close a position during the incident that made them press the button.
Cancel-only
No new orders reach a venue; cancels and reductions still do. The mode for winding down without unwinding — you keep every ability that lowers exposure and lose every ability that raises it.
The kill switch
Refuses risk approvals outright, so nothing new can be authorised anywhere. It is a platform-wide act, held by an operator, and it is deliberately not something a strategy or an assistant can reach.
What none of them block
Cancelling. A gate that refuses a cancel traps you in a position it will not let you leave, which is strictly more dangerous than the thing it was protecting you from. Cancels are never gated — not by mode, not by entitlement, not by a stale limit.
The properties that make them worth having
They are checked where orders leave, not where they start
A mode enforced in the interface stops the button and not the API. These are enforced at the service that holds the exchange credential, which is the last place an order can be stopped and therefore the only place worth stopping it.
A flip is recorded with who and when
Switching a mode is an auditable act, not a config change nobody can date afterwards. During an incident, "when did this go to cancel-only" is a question you need answered in seconds.
A tripped surveillance rule can say so without acting
Independent monitoring watches for the patterns that mean something is wrong — a storm of signals, a reconciliation backlog, a strategy trading far more than it backtested. It reports; it does not silently seize control. Automation that quietly stops trading and does not say so is the same failure as automation that quietly starts.
Questions about stopping
Does pausing close my positions?
No. Pausing stops new activity; it does not liquidate. Closing is your decision and stays available in every mode.
Can the AI use these?
It can tell you a mode is on, and it can suggest turning one on. Flipping it is an operator action with a scope the assistant does not hold.
What happens to a paused strategy’s open orders?
They stay where they are, with their protective exits, and you can cancel them. Nothing is cancelled on your behalf by a mode change, because a mass-cancel you did not ask for is itself a trading decision.
Press the buttons somewhere safe
The modes behave identically on a paper account, including what they refuse.