Blog
Guides worth reading
Plain-spoken writing on building and running automated trading systems, the practical parts, and the parts that only bite once your code meets a live market.
Before you build
- Freelancer, marketplace or a firm: who should build your trading botThree honest routes, when each is right, the risks of each, and the seven questions to ask anyone before paying for a bot.
- What a custom trading bot costs, and what drives the priceNo price list, but a straight answer: the seven things that decide the cost, why one build takes ten days and another months, and how to keep yours small.
- Turn a TradingView strategy into an automated trading botWebhook alerts into an execution service, or a Python rewrite at your broker: what carries across cleanly, what does not, and how to brief it.
Building & automating
- How to build a trading bot in PythonA practical, honest walk-through, from writing your rules down to fetching data, backtesting, and placing live orders through IBKR or Zerodha.
- Automating an options strategy in PythonThe option chain, strike selection, multi-leg orders and the engineering that separates a demo from a live-ready options system.
- How to backtest an options strategy properlyWhy options backtests are so easy to fake, the traps that catch almost everyone, and what an honest test actually does.
- Building a forex trading bot (EA) for MT5What an Expert Advisor is, a minimal MQL5 skeleton, MetaTrader versus a broker API, and the forex realities that catch people out.
- Futures rollover: automating contract continuityContinuous contracts, back-adjustment, and rolling a live position at the right time, the detail that quietly ruins futures systems.
Getting it right
- A reference architecture for a small prop desk's trading systemData service, one process per strategy, a risk gate with a kill switch, an order manager, broker adapters, reconciliation and audit, with a diagram and what to leave out at first.
- The edge cases that separate a demo from a live trading systemDropped connections, partial fills, stale data, reconciliation and kill switches: the unglamorous work that decides whether a system survives a live market.
- Trading infrastructure sizing: when you actually need co-locationWhen a system genuinely needs low-latency hardware or co-location, and when a cheap cloud server is the right answer.