Home / ml4t / skills · portfolio/kill-switch/SKILL.md · GitHub

ml4t-kill-switch skillA

ml4t-kill-switch is agent-read markdown (skill) from ml4t/skills: Automated risk limits that halt trading when thresholds are breached. Use when deploying live strategies that need drawdown or loss-limit protection..

Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.

What the file says

# Kill Switch

A human monitoring a dashboard will not react fast enough to a flash crash. By the time you see the loss and decide to act, the drawdown has compounded. Automated kill switches are the last line of defense - they must be hard-coded, not ML-based, and not overridable without explicit manual intervention.

## The Problem

Live trading systems face risks that backtests never encounter: data feed failures, exchange outages, runaway algorithms, and flash crashes. A strategy producing 100 orders per second during a data glitch can lose more in minutes than it earned in months. Manual monitoring fails because: (1) humans are slow, (2) losses compound nonlinearly, and (3) the worst events happen when attention is lowest. Kill switches must trigger automatically, flatten positions immediately, and require human approval to resume.

## The Pattern

### WRONG
```python
# "I'll watch the dashboard and close positions if things go wrong"
import time

while True:
    pnl = get_daily_pnl()
    if pnl < -10000:
        send_email("Loss alert")  # arrives 5 min later, read at 9am
    time.sleep(60)
# Meanwhile, the algo keeps trading during the 60s sleep
```

### CORRECT
```python
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

Latest version
mdr add ml4t/skills/ml4t-kill-switch@git:20260901.830d7a8
Exact content
mdr add ml4t/skills/ml4t-kill-switch@sha256:c32c27240f5e2d21

Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.

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Versions

versioncommittedcommitsizeaudit
git:20260901.830d7a8 latest2026-09-01 830d7a8 5,420 BA view · diff
git:20260901.1323bf42026-09-01 1323bf4 5,366 BA view · diff
git:20260901.4a671982026-09-01 4a67198 5,207 BA view · diff
git:20260901.3c85a542026-09-01 3c85a54 5,191 BA view · diff
git:20260901.85fc79b2026-09-01 85fc79b 4,983 BA view

Audit of the latest version

A  17 of 17 checks passed. Deterministic, no model, same answer every run.
  • pass: Frontmatter block present
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a name
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a description
  • pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (5420 bytes)
  • pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
  • pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
  • pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
  • pass: No credential-shaped string
  • pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
  • pass: No text hidden with inline styles
  • pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
  • pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
  • pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
  • pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
  • pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
  • pass: No link to a raw IP address
  • pass: No script tag

Source

GitHub

ml4t/skills · 19 stars · license Apache-2.0 · pushed 2026-09-24 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_zvrapc2gq3ptos5k
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=ml4t/skills/ml4t-kill-switch
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/c32c27240f5e2d21f5559da551f8889f64b7a47cecd047752d384f5ab80bf75f

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