Starting a Stock Trading Bot: Five Checks Before Live Orders
TECH INSIGHT / EXPLAINED
The first milestone for a trading bot is control over orders, not an attractive return chart. Turn broker connectivity, simulation, cost accounting, usage conditions, and recovery into five concrete deliverables.
1. Build an API comparison sheet
Compare supported markets, operating systems, quote transport, paper-trading coverage, rate limits, and order/execution queries. REST broadens server-language choices but does not imply identical features. Installation and architecture restrictions also vary by product. Korea Investment & Securities publishes official authentication and product-specific examples.
Separate paper and live keys, account identifiers, and endpoints as complete environment configurations. Display the environment in screens and logs. Store token expiry metadata, but exclude tokens and app secrets from logs. Do not respond to every authentication failure by issuing tokens indefinitely.
2. Set acceptance criteria, not just a duration
Two weeks of paper trading is not proof of readiness. Exercise holidays, expired authentication, partial fills, rejections, a disconnect immediately after submission, and restarts. Paper environments can differ from live execution in liquidity, fills, and order support.
A missing response does not prove that an order failed. Persist a request identifier and reconcile against broker order records before deciding what to do next. A 60-second per-symbol cooldown only throttles requests; it does not guarantee deduplication across restarts, concurrency, or delayed responses.
3. Treat costs as inputs
Model commissions, applicable taxes, currency conversion, and slippage separately. This article supplies no current tax rate. Record the applicable account schedule, official tax source, and effective date.
For a hypothetical purchase of 100 shares at 10,000 and sale at 10,100, gross profit is 10,000 currency units. Assuming total commissions of 300 and other costs of 2,000 leaves 7,700. These are invented accounting inputs, not Korean tax rates. A further adverse movement of 20 per share on each side adds 4,000 in round-trip slippage.
4. Verify the allowed scope
Automating your own account still requires compliant order behavior and adherence to API terms. Managing other people's money, providing paid advice, or redistributing quotes can involve separate rules, authorizations, and data rights. A personal program is not a blanket exemption.
5. Be able to explain the stopped state
Stopping new orders, inspecting or cancelling open orders, and reconciling positions are separate operations. Check all three before enabling the bot. Log decision time, signal, order identifier, acceptance/fill state, and error category; redact secrets and full account numbers. These controls do not eliminate losses, but they provide evidence to reconstruct what happened.
Designing a bot interface that makes accidental orders harder
References
Content and examples reviewed: 2026-09-29
댓글
댓글 쓰기