Developer finds critical bugs in trading bot just before expanding to live markets

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A solo developer working on an automated stock trading system spent the weekend reviewing strategy hypotheses and conducting a pre-live-trading audit of their system. On Saturday, three long-deferred strategy ideas — changing trade frequency, adding intraday signals, and switching to US markets — were each re-examined and shelved, with the existing framework of three daily batch executions on the domestic market kept intact. Sunday's full system audit uncovered several serious issues, including a budget calculation bug that had been accidentally masking poor performance by coincidentally avoiding sharp market drops. Further checks revealed that the live order routing was still connected to a paper-trading environment despite documentation claiming otherwise, and safety-check tests were passing without actually reaching the logic they were meant to verify. The developer considers it fortunate that these failures were caught before expanding real-money trading, as none would have been visible under normal operation.

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