// GLOSSARY

Subaccount

A partitioned account under your main one, with its own balance, positions, and risk limits. The standard way to isolate strategies or AI agents: each gets its own budget and kill switch, and one blowing up can't drain the others.

A subaccount is a firewall inside your own account. Funds, positions, and permissions are scoped to it; the parent account sees everything, but activity inside one subaccount can't touch another's balance.

Why traders use them

• Strategy isolation: the market-making book and the event-arb book keep separate P&L, so you can actually tell which one earns.
• Agent containment: give an AI agent a subaccount with $500 and a notional cap, not your main balance and a promise.
• Independent risk controls: each subaccount can carry its own limits and its own kill switch — halt the experiment without halting production.

Worked example

You run one subaccount per agent configuration you're testing. Config B develops a re-order loop overnight; it exhausts its own $200 budget and its cap stops it there. Configs A and C trade on unaffected, and the morning post-mortem has a clean, isolated trail. Mithril supports subaccounts with per-subaccount limits for exactly this pattern — see risk limits for AI trading agents.