Your EA crashed at 3am — who hits the brake?

Description and use

The article explains how lacking a brake in an automated trading system can cause unintended positions and drawdowns. It proposes VigilDesk, a monitoring and kill‑switch layer that watches the terminal and EA, detects anomalies, and lets the trader stop trading.

Problem

An automated trading system (EA) continues to trade after encountering errors, leading to unintended positions and account drawdown.

Outcome

Implementing VigilDesk prevents runaway trading, caps tail risk, and provides a manual override to stop the EA during crashes or abnormal conditions.

Workflow

• 1. Monitor terminal and EA process health (alive, heartbeat, connection).
• 2. Detect abnormal states (frozen chart, growing position count, error bursts, unexpected terminal restart).
• 3. Provide a human switch to stop opening new trades and close existing ones.
• 4. Fail towards safety if watchdog loses sight of terminal.
• 5. Alert trader via push/Telegram when anomalies occur.
• 6. Test kill switch on demo before live use.

Evidence

Most EA setups have no brake. They have a take-profit and a stop-loss, and that is it.

Source

A safety layer is not a strategy and it does not need to be clever. It needs to be boring and awake:

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That is the whole idea behind the tool we built for our own setups: VigilDesk — a safety layer (brake, alerts, crash detection) for MT5.

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Turn on alerts you will actually receive (push, Telegram, whatever cuts through do-not-disturb).

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