Why Your Trading Agent Needs a Pre-Trade Gate

Your agent traded $50,000 into a halted market at 3am. Nobody was watching. This isn't a hypothetical. It's the failure mode that autonomous trading agents are quietly running toward - and almost nobody has a circuit breaker in place. The Blind Spot in Autonomous Execution Agents that execute trades check a lot of things. Price feeds. Order book depth. Portfolio constraints. Risk limits. Slippage estimates. What they almost never check: is the exchange actually open right now? Price feeds don't tell you the exchange is closed.