Building trading automation taught us something about fragile systems
While building automated trading strategies over the years, we noticed something interesting about most crypto automation setups.
They often rely on several separate tools connected together.... signals, webhooks, bot platforms, exchanges, dashboards, etc.
It works well when everything behaves, but when markets get volatile or APIs slow down, the whole chain can become fragile. One small failure can break the process.
That realisation was actually one of the motivations behind us building our own platform recently, with the main focus on reducing the number of moving parts.
I’m curious how other builders here approach this problem when designing automation systems.
Do you try to keep everything in one system, or are you comfortable relying on several tools working together?
I have a background in this. Building trading automation is where I learned how fragile chained systems get. One API timeout and your whole pipeline breaks. I ended up open-sourcing a realtime backtest engine to help with testing these setups: pip install replaybt for anyone who wants to try it.
To your question: I lean toward fewer moving parts. Every integration point is a failure point, especially in volatile markets where you need reliability most.
That’s interesting, especially the point about testing chained systems. In trading automation the failure points really compound once several tools are talking to each other.
Curious whether ReplayBT helped you mainly with debugging edge cases, or more with validating strategy behaviour before going live?