I run automated NIFTY options strategies — my own code, my own account, 18 years in software engineering. On 25th August, my engine confirmed a buy signal at 9:21 AM — and placed no order until 9:54 AM.
For 33 minutes, everything looked healthy. Process running. Websocket showing “connected.” No errors in any log. But the feed had silently stopped delivering ticks, and the engine was living in the past. It eventually filled the signal 33 minutes stale at a much worse price — and because that zombie position occupied its slot, it blocked the next valid trade, which would have paid well.
The post-mortem taught me three things worth checking in your own setup:
- My subscribe call silently did nothing on reconnect — it marked the instrument “subscribed” before confirming ticks were actually flowing, logged success unconditionally, and never retried.
- Nothing in my system measured “seconds since the last tick.” Feed freshness is the single most important health metric an intraday algo has, and I wasn’t tracking it.
- The immediate fix was in-engine guards — staleness checks, subscribe-retry-until-confirmed, reconciling my engine’s positions against the broker’s book every cycle. But the uncomfortable realization: any guard living inside the same process or server dies with it. If the box freezes, the guard freezes too, and silence looks exactly like health. A real watchdog has to live outside, with its own broker connection.
So that’s what I’m building now — an independent watchdog service: read-only broker access (it cannot place orders, by construction), watching for stale feeds, dead bots, position drift, rejected orders — including rejected stop-losses, which burn manual traders just as badly — and calling your phone, an actual ringing call, when something is wrong. Early-access list is open if you want the same guard: Wachly — It calls your phone when your money is unprotected — and if this kind of link isn’t OK here, mods, tell me and I’ll remove it.
Honest question for this forum: would you pay ₹499/month for this, or build your own? Both answers genuinely help me decide what to build first. And happy to go as deep as anyone wants on the root cause in the comments.