Kill switch in trading: Upstox, Zerodha, Angel One, Dhan, Fyers, Groww

Most Indian brokers have a kill switch. If yours is one of them, it is sitting in a settings menu you have probably never opened.

It is one of the most useful tools available to a retail trader in India and almost nobody uses it, mostly because of two misunderstandings about what it does. This post clears both up, and shows how it works at each broker.

What a kill switch is

A kill switch is a control in your broker's own platform that blocks you from placing new orders until a set time.

You turn it on. From that moment your account will not accept a fresh order. You cannot switch it back off in the afternoon because you changed your mind, and that is the entire value of it. Some broker help pages quote a wait of 12 hours and others say the next trading day. Either way, treat it as final for the day.

Most major Indian brokers have some version of this, but not all of them. The name and the exact rules differ. The table below shows each one.

What it does not do

Two things, and both surprise people.

It does not close your open positions. A kill switch stops new orders. It does not sell anything for you. In fact, the brokers that offer one ask you to close your open positions first, and only then let you switch the block on. So it is something you do after you have closed out. It is not a way to escape a trade that is still losing.

It does not undo the day. It is a stop, not a reset. The money already lost is lost. What it protects is the next four hours, which for most people is where the real damage happens anyway.

Kill switch at each broker (checked October 2026)

Broker	Has one?	What it is called	What it blocks	Good to know
Zerodha	Yes	Kill Switch	The segments you choose, such as F&O	Close open positions and orders first
Upstox	Yes	Kill Switch	The segments you choose	Close positions first. Pending orders are cancelled for you. Asks for an OTP
Dhan	Yes	Kill Switch for Over-Trading	Your whole account	Square off and cancel orders first. Stays on for the rest of the day
Fyers	Yes	Take a Break	The segments you choose	Close positions first. Asks for an OTP
Groww	Yes	Lock F&O Trading	F&O and commodity. Stocks and mutual funds stay open	Close positions first. Locks until 11:59 PM and cannot be reversed
Angel One	No	None	Not applicable	Has Secure Exit instead, which closes your positions automatically at a profit or loss level you set

Angel One's Secure Exit is a different thing from a kill switch. It acts on your open positions for you. A kill switch only blocks new orders and leaves the positions to you.

How to turn on the kill switch in Upstox

1. Close every open position. Upstox will not switch it on otherwise, and it cancels your pending orders for you.
2. Open your account's segment settings, choose Kill Switch and pick the segments to block, for example F&O.
3. Confirm with the OTP Upstox sends you. There is no way back until the next session.

Zerodha works the same way from Console: close positions and orders, choose the segments, confirm. More on each in our Upstox and Zerodha guides.

Does Angel One have a kill switch?

No. There is no kill switch in Angel One that blocks new orders. Angel One has Secure Exit, which closes your open positions when a profit or loss level you set is hit. If you want a hard daily stop on Angel One, set a daily loss limit and decide in advance what you do when you hit it. See our Angel One guide.

Broker rules change, and brokers do not always agree with each other's help pages on the details, so check yours before you rely on anything here. Our sources: Zerodha, Upstox, Dhan, Groww and Angel One Secure Exit.

Why switching it on is deliberately awkward

Several brokers ask for an OTP or an extra confirmation when you switch it on, and Groww makes you slide to lock. People find this annoying. It is the most important part of the design.

The friction is what makes the switch a real commitment rather than a checkbox. A control you can toggle with one click is a control you will untoggle with one click at 1:30 PM.

It is also why LossGuardian does not switch it on for you, and never will. Some brokers offer developer tools that could do it from outside. We chose not to build that. A safety control that trips on its own is one you stop trusting, and LossGuardian is read-only by design. Be careful with any tool that offers to switch your kill switch on automatically: you would be handing it the power to lock your own account.

What we do instead: when you breach your limit, and your broker has a kill switch, the app opens your broker's own page for it, so finding it takes one click instead of five. You switch it on yourself. For Angel One there is nothing to link to, so your own rule is the only brake.

Why almost nobody uses it

Three reasons, and they are all fixable.

They do not know where it is. It is buried in settings, next to things you never touch. Go and find it right now, before you need it. Knowing where it lives is most of the battle.

They think it is for emergencies. People imagine using it once, on a catastrophic day. So on an ordinary bad day, where they are down more than they planned but nothing dramatic has happened, it never crosses their mind. Ordinary bad days are exactly what it is for.

They plan to use it and then do not. This is the real reason. The moment you should hit the kill switch is the moment you least want to, because hitting it means accepting the loss as final. At 1:30 PM, down ₹11,000, with one more setup on the screen, the switch stays off. Every time.

Making it a rule instead of a panic button

The fix is to decide in advance, in writing, when you will use it. Then it is not a judgement call made under pressure.

Write the trigger down before the market opens. Something specific:

• "If I am down ₹12,000, kill switch on."
• "After six trades, kill switch on."
• "Two losses in a row after 1 PM, kill switch on."

The trigger has to be a number, not a feeling. "If I start tilting" is not a rule, because the whole problem with tilt is that you do not notice it while it is happening.

Use it on ordinary days too. If it is only for disasters, it will never get used, because no day feels like a disaster while it is happening. Days feel like a disaster afterwards.

Combine it with a cooldown. The kill switch ends the day. A cooldown, ten minutes with no new position after a losing trade, catches the problem earlier, before the day needs ending at all. Use both. More on that in how to stop overtrading.

The gap the kill switch leaves

Here is the honest limitation, and it is not a small one.

The kill switch is a manual control. Something has to make you walk over and press it, at the exact moment you have the least appetite for pressing it. The broker does not tell you that you have hit your limit, because the broker does not know what your limit is. You never told it. You wrote it in a notebook.

So the sequence you actually need is: notice you crossed your line, accept it, open settings, find the switch, confirm it. Five steps, starting with the two hardest.

That gap is what LossGuardian was built for. It reads your trades from your broker as they happen, tracks them against the limits you set that morning, and when you cross one it puts an always-on-top alert in front of you that you cannot click away. The alert quotes your own rule back at you, and, where your broker has a kill switch, opens its page.

It is read-only. It cannot place, modify or cancel an order, and it cannot flip the switch. You still do that part yourself. That is deliberate, for the same reason we will never square off your position for you: the decision is what builds the habit, and software that takes the decision away never makes you a trader who does not need it.

What it changes is the noticing. Most people do not fail at the kill switch. They just never get told they should be reaching for it.

Do this today

1. Open your broker app and find the kill switch. Do not turn it on. Just find it. If you use Angel One, there is none to find, so your written rule has to do the work.
2. Write down one number that will trigger it tomorrow.
3. Check what confirmation your broker asks for, so you are not fumbling for it at the moment you need it.

That is fifteen minutes, and it is worth more than most of what you will read about trading this month.

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Broker-specific setup: Zerodha, Dhan, Fyers, Upstox, Angel One, Groww. See also how LossGuardian compares with other risk tools, and how to set a daily loss limit.