Controls Overview

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Trading systems fail in predictable ways.

A strategy deploys with an incorrect configuration. A market event creates unexpected volatility. A runaway algorithm continues submitting orders after crossing risk limits. An operator forgets to disable a strategy before maintenance. A symbol begins behaving differently than expected. Anthid Controls provide a centralized risk and governance layer that sits between your application and your broker. Controls are evaluated before execution, allowing you to enforce operational safeguards without modifying application logic. Controls can be applied at three levels:

• Organization. Global controls that apply across your entire organization.
• Trading Account. Controls specific to a broker account.
• Symbol. Controls for individual symbols or instruments.

The levels are additive. A narrower control tightens what a broader one already permits, and can never loosen it. See How controls combine.

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Availability

Availability depends on the scope, not on controls as a whole. Trading account controls are included with any plan that can trade live. The account kill switch, account risk limits, and account trading windows are all available there, as is checking an order against them before you send it. Putting the account-level breaker on the top plan alone would have kept the guardrail away from exactly the trader most likely to need it. Organization-wide and per-symbol controls require the Professional plan. That covers the global kill switch and everything scoped to an individual instrument. Changing a control is restricted to organization administrators, or to an API credential your firm has explicitly granted control edit permission. Reading controls is available more broadly, so an operations dashboard can display the current state without being able to alter it. For the exact entitlement and permission model, and what a caller sees when it is not authorized, see the Controls API reference.

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Why Controls Matter

Most trading platforms focus on order execution. Anthid focuses on both execution and protection. Controls allow engineering teams, operations teams, and trading teams to:

• Prevent accidental trading activity.
• Enforce risk limits consistently.
• Restrict trading to approved market hours.
• Protect against software defects and unexpected market conditions.
• Reduce operational risk without modifying strategy code.
• Apply changes immediately without redeploying applications.

Controls become increasingly important as organizations scale from a single strategy to multiple systems, accounts, brokers, and operators.

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Organization Controls

Organization controls provide the highest level of protection. These controls apply across every connected trading account and every strategy operating within the organization.

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Manual Controls

Organization manual controls provide a global trading kill switch. When disabled, trading activity is prevented across the organization regardless of account-level or symbol-level configuration. Common use cases include:

• Emergency trading suspension.
• Scheduled maintenance windows.
• Incident response.
• Compliance-driven shutdowns.
• Strategy rollout pauses.

Because organization controls sit at the highest level of the hierarchy, they provide a simple and effective way to immediately stop trading activity across your environment.

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Trading Account Controls

Trading account controls provide account-specific governance and risk management. These controls allow organizations to manage individual broker accounts independently while maintaining organization-wide standards.

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Manual Controls

Account manual controls enable or disable trading for a specific account. Examples include:

• Disabling a paper account.
• Pausing a live account during investigation.
• Restricting a newly onboarded account.
• Isolating a single account during an incident.

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Risk Controls

Account risk controls limit exposure before orders reach the broker. Available controls include:

• Maximum daily loss amount.
• Maximum daily loss percentage.
• Maximum position size.
• Maximum order size.

These controls help prevent excessive losses caused by software defects, unexpected market conditions, or operational mistakes. Rather than relying solely on strategy-level safeguards, account risk controls provide an independent enforcement layer.

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Time Controls

Account time controls restrict when trading is permitted. Available controls include:

• Trading start time.
• Trading end time.
• Stale order threshold.

Examples include:

• Restricting trading to regular market hours.
• Preventing overnight activity.
• Enforcing session-based trading windows.
• Blocking orders that have become stale.

Time controls help ensure trading activity occurs only during approved operating periods.

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Symbol Controls

Symbol controls provide the most granular level of protection. These controls allow organizations to manage individual symbols independently while inheriting broader organization and account protections. Symbol controls are particularly useful for volatile instruments, newly deployed strategies, and assets requiring additional oversight.

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Manual Controls

Symbol manual controls allow specific symbols to be enabled or disabled. Examples include:

• Disabling trading in a volatile stock.
• Restricting a symbol during earnings announcements.
• Temporarily suspending a problematic instrument.
• Limiting exposure during market events.

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Risk Controls

Symbol risk controls enforce limits on individual instruments. Available controls include:

• Maximum daily loss amount.
• Maximum daily loss percentage.
• Maximum position size.
• Maximum order size.

The same enforcement limitation applies here as at the account level: only maximum order size is checked at submission today. This allows organizations to apply stricter controls to higher-risk symbols without affecting the rest of the account. For example, a leveraged ETF may require significantly tighter limits than a large-cap equity position.

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Time Controls

Symbol time controls restrict trading windows for specific instruments. They are set in UTC, exactly as account time controls are. Examples include:

• Restricting trading around earnings releases.
• Limiting activity during specific market sessions.
• Enforcing custom trading windows for individual symbols.
• Blocking activity outside approved trading periods.

Symbol-level time controls provide precise operational control without impacting other instruments.

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How controls combine

Controls are additive, and the most restrictive one wins. Every level is evaluated independently against the same order. Organization, account, and symbol controls each produce their own verdict, and the results are collected rather than compared. An order is allowed only when nothing triggered anywhere. A single trigger at any level refuses it. This has one consequence worth stating directly, because it is the most common wrong assumption about a hierarchy of settings: Where the same limit is set at more than one level, the effect is the tightest of them. An account maximum order size of 100 with a symbol maximum order size of 50 rejects an order for 75, because the symbol limit triggered. Reversing the two numbers rejects the same order for the same reason, with the account limit triggering instead. Neither level has to know what the other is set to.

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What a refusal tells you

An evaluation returns every control that triggered, not just the first one. Each entry names the scope it came from, the control type, and a reason. An order blocked by both a closed trading window and an oversized quantity reports both, so a single call is enough to see everything standing between the order and the broker. The same detail is written to the refusal record, so a supervisory review sees exactly what the caller saw. See Compliance for how refusals are recorded and retained.

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Checking before you submit

Anthid can run the full evaluation against a hypothetical order and return the result without sending anything to the broker. It is the same evaluation a real submission gets, so it answers “would this be allowed right now” exactly. This is worth doing on the first order of a session, or any time limits may have changed underneath a system that has been running a while. See the Controls API reference for how to call it.

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What each level can hold

Not every control type exists at every level, and the levels are not all on the same plan. Organization scope is a kill switch and nothing else. There are no organization-wide risk limits or trading windows, so a limit meant to apply everywhere has to be set on each account. The account level is the one that carries every control type and sits on every live plan, which makes it the level to reach for first.

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How quickly a change takes effect

A control change reaches the order path within about a second. It is fast, but it is not instantaneous. This matters in exactly one situation: stopping trading during an incident. Set the switch, then confirm it has taken effect rather than assuming the very next order is already covered. An evaluation check is the way to confirm. Together, these controls create multiple independent layers of protection between your application and the market. As trading infrastructure scales, controls become just as important as execution. Anthid Controls help ensure that strategies remain governed, risk remains bounded, and operational mistakes do not become costly incidents.