You don’t need a trading desk to keep tabs on an agent — you need a short list of things to watch and a way to get pinged when they move. Here’s the practical version.
What to watch
- Trade frequency. A sudden burst of orders is the earliest sign of a runaway loop or a reaction to bad input. Your circuit breaker should halt it, but you still want to know.
- Daily volume vs. your cap. If the agent is regularly pressing against the daily limit, the strategy may be over-trading.
- Concentration. Watch how much is sitting in any one name relative to your concentration cap — drift toward the cap is worth a look.
- Unexpected tickers. Anything outside your allowlist or your thesis is a flag, full stop.
- Drawdown. Track the account against what you funded; a fast drop is your cue to step in (and a reason to set the account stop-loss in the Safety Kit).
How to alert yourself
- Robinhood push notifications on every trade — leave them on. This is your real-time feed.
- A daily tally from the agent. Ask it to report, once a day: number of trades, total traded, current positions, and P&L. A 20-second read.
- A weekly deeper look — covered in auditing your agent’s trades.
Red flags that warrant a stop
Treat any of these as a reason to say "STOP" and look closer:
- More trades in an hour than you’d expect in a day.
- A position blowing past — or right up against — your concentration cap.
- A ticker you never approved.
- The agent citing news or a "signal" as the reason it changed its own behavior — that’s a possible injection attempt.
- A drawdown bigger than you’re comfortable with, fast.
None of these mean disaster — they mean pause and check. The kill switch makes stopping instant, and most flags turn out to be the strategy needing a tweak, not an emergency.
Knowing which signal means "pause" is pattern recognition under pressure — a measurable skill. Test yours at secprove.com.