Stale Price Bug in Trading Bots Can Render Stop-Loss Orders Ineffective
A software auditor has identified a recurring flaw in at least three live trading bots, including one they personally operate, where stop-loss levels are anchored to a price read before an order is actually filled. Because bots often wait seconds or even minutes between reading a price and confirming an executed trade, the reference price used to set protective stops can be significantly out of sync with the real entry price. In one Solana DEX bot, a swap confirmation delay of up to five minutes meant the actual fill price was logged but never returned to the caller, leaving the stop-loss calculated from a stale pre-swap figure. A separate futures bot suffered a similar outcome due to misaligned function arguments that silently routed every stop-loss exit through a slow limit-order path instead of an immediate market close. The author argues the bug is difficult to spot in casual code review and only surfaces when tracing a single price value across the full lifecycle from trade signal to order fill.
