Guided makes you press Approve on every trade. That's intentional — when you're bringing your own broker connection for the first time, watching every proposal land before any real money moves is the right amount of friction.
After a few months of that, the friction stops being protective and starts being annoying. Most proposals look the same. You approve them. You approve them again. The engine has banked $4,000 in losses for you and you've spent ~30 minutes a week clicking buttons.
That's when Autopilot earns its $99/month.
What Autopilot changes
- Auto-execute within rails. Proposals that pass the safety check (caps, kill switch, sector rules) execute automatically.
- Multi-account households. Connect multiple taxable brokerages — Joint, individual, IRA, 529 — and the wash-sale engine pools across all of them.
- Same review surface, optional. You still see every proposal in the dashboard. You can still veto inside the configurable window. Approve becomes opt-out, not opt-in.
- Stop-loss handling. The engine watches positions that approach configured stop levels and proposes (or auto-executes, your call) the harvest.
The autonomy graduation rails
Autopilot doesn't drop you straight into lights-out execution. There's a five-stage progression you control from Settings → Autonomy:
| Stage | Behavior | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Disabled | Proposals require manual approve. Same as Guided. | The default state when you first switch to Autopilot. |
| Shadow | The governor logs what it WOULD have auto-approved, but takes no action. You watch the log for a few weeks. | Building trust. Lets you see the governor's judgment without the governor taking action. |
| Small | Auto-execute up to $5K per trade, $25K per day. | Letting the engine handle routine harvests while big trades still bounce to manual. |
| Standard | Auto-execute up to $25K per trade, $100K per day. 30-min veto window on every proposal. | Most users settle here. Real money, real automation, real safety net. |
| Full | No per-trade or daily caps; only the system-wide kill switch. | Multi-million-dollar portfolios where capping at $100K/day leaves harvests on the table. |
The veto window
Even at full autonomy, every auto-approved proposal sits in a configurable veto window before it goes to broker. Default is 30 minutes. You get a Slack / email / SMS notification the moment the governor approves; the proposal sits in READY_TO_EXECUTE state until the window expires; if you click Reject in that window, the engine cancels.
What this gives you: the engine acts on its own confidence, but you can pull the brake within half an hour. Trades the engine made overnight while you were asleep show up as a "here's what I did, here's why" notification when you check in the morning.
The kill switch
Autopilot maintains a hard system-wide kill switch. Anyone with admin access can trip it from Settings → System → Kill Switch. When tripped:
- No new orders, manual or auto, hit any broker.
- Pending broker orders are cancelled where possible.
- The engine continues to compute proposals (so the post-mortem trail is intact) but they all stamp
BLOCKED — kill switch active.
Tripping the kill switch never destroys data. Restoring it requires explicit "I understand the consequences" confirmation. It's the panic button.
Time and money saved
Concrete numbers from typical users:
- Guided users approve 8-15 proposals per month. At ~2 minutes each, that's 25-40 min/month of clicking.
- Autopilot at Standard auto-handles ~80% of those and routes the remaining 20% to manual review. Time spent drops to ~5-10 min/month.
- Autopilot also catches harvests during the day that Guided users miss because they don't check the dashboard at 10:30 AM. On a $1M portfolio that adds up to ~$2K-$5K/yr of additional captured losses.
When Autopilot doesn't make sense
You should stay on Guided if:
- You only check email once a week. The veto window helps when you can react inside it; it's useless if you don't.
- Your portfolio is concentrated (single-stock > 30%). Auto-execution against concentrated positions multiplies risk if the engine misjudges.
- You're in a year where realized gains are unusual (sale of a home, RSU vesting cliff). Manual approve gives you a chance to think about each harvest in the context of the year's total picture.
For everyone else: shadow mode for two weeks, then Standard. That's the path most users take.