Emergency stop: one account, or all of them

What a kill does

When a kill command reaches the Agent in your MT5 terminal, it does three things, in this order:

1. Closes the EA's chart. An EA lives on a chart; closing the chart removes it, so it cannot open a new trade a second later.
2. Deletes pending orders, so nothing is filled after the stop.
3. Closes open positions at the market price, trying again a few times within seconds if some are left.

Then it reports back: how many charts, orders and positions it closed, and anything left open. You see the result in Quantrivance and on Telegram.

A kill is an aid, not a guarantee. It closes at the price of the moment, which in a fast market may be worse than you hoped, and a broker can refuse an order. After a kill, your EAs stay off until you open their charts and attach them again yourself.

Before you need it

A kill-switch is something to set up on a quiet day, not during the emergency. It takes three things:

• Two-step verification (2FA) on your Quantrivance account. Every kill asks for a code from your authenticator app, so a stolen password alone cannot stop your trading.
• Control turned on at the terminal. In the Agent's Inputs, set "Let the web app stop trading here" (AllowControl) to true, and turn on Algo Trading on MT5's toolbar. This is off by default and only you can turn it on, at the terminal. Without Algo Trading the Agent can close charts but not positions.
• Charts bound to strategies. On the Strategies page, bind each EA's chart to its magic number, so that stopping one strategy closes the right chart. Name your strategies by magic number shows how.

With control on, the Agent reports every 15 seconds instead of every minute, so commands reach it quickly.

Stopping one strategy or one account

On the Strategies page, each account has Stop whole account, and each strategy can be stopped on its own. Before you confirm, the page shows what will be closed. Then you type your 6-digit code.

Stopping one strategy closes the positions and orders of that magic number and the chart you bound to it. If no chart is bound, only its positions are closed, and the EA keeps running.

Stopping every account

Stop all accounts sends a whole-account kill to every account it can reach, on one code. Before you press it, you see which accounts the command cannot reach and why, for example an Agent that is not reporting or has control off. Those accounts are skipped, and named again in the result.

Stopping every account at once needs a subscription (the free trial counts). Stopping accounts one at a time always works, even after a subscription has ended.

When a command cannot arrive

The command waits for the Agent to collect it on its next report. That is why it depends on your terminal being online:

• A terminal that is off, or offline, cannot be reached. If your PC sleeps or your VPS is down, no command arrives. Run MT5 on a machine that stays on.
• Commands expire after 2 minutes. If the Agent has not collected a command by then, it is dropped, so an old kill is never carried out hours later by surprise.
• Each command runs once. Pressing the button again while a command is waiting gives you the same command back, not a second one.

Every kill is recorded with its time and IP address in the Control history, and reported on Telegram. Five wrong codes in 15 minutes lock the kill-switch for a while, so nobody can guess their way in.

If you want a stop that does not depend on anyone pressing anything, or on the network, look at Guard: the Agent enforces limits you set, on its own, inside the terminal.

This post is for education and is not investment advice. Examples use made-up figures, not anyone’s results. Trading carries risk.