What does your trading bot think happened?
Trading software usually knows only what it meant to do. I'm building a small engine that keeps a receipt for every order.
When I worked on trading software, I spent most of my time reading logs and trace files, trying to figure out what went wrong. I wanted to build tools that would help customers do the same thing themselves. But there was resistance to automating work that kept the support team busy.
I never really agreed with that. If your software knows something went wrong, you shouldn’t have to call somebody to find out what happened.
Lately I’ve been reading what people who build trading bots write when something goes wrong. It’s a familiar story. An order goes out twice. A cancel doesn’t actually cancel. A stop someone counted on isn’t there anymore. And usually nobody can say for sure what happened, because the software only knows what it meant to do.
That’s the part I want to fix. I’m building a small trading engine that keeps a receipt for every order: what it sent, what the broker said back, and what’s still open. When it isn’t sure, it says so instead of guessing. Right now it only runs on paper accounts.
If this has happened to you, sign up and tell me about it. It’s free, and I read every one.
And if you build a trading tool yourself and want a second pair of eyes on how it handles orders, say so in the same form.