Disarmed, EMIL observes. It reads the market and your book, classifies conditions, and says what it sees. It cannot place, modify or close anything.
Armed, EMIL takes trades. That is the point of arming it, and it is worth being precise about what that involves rather than hiding it behind the word "automation".
The three modes
Off. EMIL is not running. The terminal is a terminal.
Assist. EMIL observes and proposes. A proposal appears for you to accept or reject. Nothing reaches the market on its own.
Armed. EMIL acts. Within the mandate you wrote, with the trading permissions you granted, in the markets you selected, until you disarm it.
What "acts" covers
You grant permissions individually, and EMIL can only do what you granted:
- Open — establish a new position within the exposure limit.
- Close — exit a position, in whole or in part.
- Modify — adjust a working order or a protective level.
- Hedge — offset existing exposure rather than adding to it.
Granting close without open is a common and sensible configuration: EMIL is allowed to reduce risk but never to create it. Many desks run exactly that way for months before granting anything more.
Every action goes through the same gate
An order EMIL proposes has no privileged path to the market. It passes the same pre-trade checks as an order you type yourself:
Mandate active PASS
Instrument in scope PASS
Trading permission granted PASS
Exposure within limit PASS
Concentration limit REFUSEOne refusal stops the order. The reason is recorded and shown — never swallowed. This is why the intelligence layer being adaptive is safe: adaptation changes what it proposes, and the gate is somewhere else entirely.
Arming is deliberate on purpose
There is no one-click arm. Requesting arm opens an authorisation dialog that states what EMIL will be permitted to do, the hard limits, and that it cannot remove market risk. The dialog does not close by clicking outside it. You confirm by typing a confirmation word.
We made that awkward deliberately. Authorising software to trade your capital should not feel like accepting a cookie banner.
It also includes one sentence we insist on keeping:
Not trading is also a trading decision.
Disarming is the opposite
One button, always rendered, high contrast, no confirmation. The Escape key works too. Withdrawing authority is instant and never requires navigating anywhere.
That asymmetry — hard to arm, trivial to disarm — is the correct shape for a control that has real consequences.
What happens on breach
Breaching a limit does not produce a silent stop. Depending on what you configured:
- Exposure limit reached — EMIL stops opening. It may still close if you granted that.
- Daily loss budget consumed — EMIL stops acting and continues observing, logging that it has stopped and why.
- Drawdown guard hit — EMIL disarms itself and says so.
In every case the log records the boundary, the reading that led there, and what EMIL did about it.
Next: the capital architecture — how protected, profit and working capital are kept separate.
Trading leveraged products carries a high level of risk to capital. Technology can improve analysis and controls; it cannot remove market risk.