Blog
Anonymized write-ups of the failure modes that keep showing up when I read live, real-money trading bot code closely — no repo names, no calling anyone out, just the pattern and how to check for it in your own code.
A prop-firm drawdown guard promised a permanent halt after a max-loss breach, but its own startup code cleared the halt and re-anchored the baseline. A one-day fix, and the four-week expiry detail that most fixes miss.
Read the post →A duplicate-trade guard that checks open positions but not resting orders, and a "daily" loss limit that is really since-launch — two bugs from an open-source EA audit, and what the maintainer did when they replied.
Read the post →A stop-loss and take-profit sized for a clean 2:1 reward:risk ratio, correct in price terms, that traded live at roughly 0.75:1. No bug in the exits — the gap was commission eating a narrow stop far more than a wide target.
Read the post →Not from a client audit — a documented TradingView platform mechanic worth ruling out first: why a Pine Script strategy can look profitable in the Strategy Tester and lose money live, and a second, easy-to-miss variant when the requested timeframe isn't actually higher than your chart's.
Read the post →Two more bugs from live trading bot audits: a daily loss limit that a routine auto-restart silently wipes to zero, and a trailing stop-loss that moves in a Python variable while the real order resting on the exchange never budges.
Read the post →Two more bugs from live trading bot audits — where the protection looked real everywhere except in the one place that mattered: a stop-loss that logs "closed" but never sends an order, and a daily-loss limit fed a hardcoded zero that can never trip.
Read the post →A pattern found across three independent trading bots — including one I run myself: stop-loss and take-profit levels computed from a price that's minutes stale by the time the position actually opens.
Read the post →Contact
Not investment advice. Honest Backtest provides technical code review and
backtest recalculation only — an honest read on what the code and the numbers actually show,
not a recommendation to trade.
Photography via Unsplash.