Building an automated trading platform with real risk controls

The challenge

Strategies existed in spreadsheets and analysts' heads, executed manually and inconsistently. Nobody could reconstruct why a given trade had been placed.

What we did

• Formalised strategies as code, with backtesting against historical data
• Enforced hard risk limits at the platform layer — position size, daily loss, maximum drawdown — that no strategy could override
• Mandatory paper-trading period before any strategy touched real capital
• Complete audit log: every order traceable to the signal and parameters that produced it

Outcome

• Execution became consistent and reconstructible
• Risk limits enforced by the system rather than by discipline
• Full audit trail for compliance review

“The risk limits being un-overridable was the feature we did not know we needed.”

— Investment firm

Risk disclosure. Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Backtested performance is not indicative of future results. Nothing here is investment advice.

Client names are withheld under our confidentiality agreements. Outcomes are described qualitatively rather than with precise figures we are not permitted to publish — we would rather say less than overstate.

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