Execution Systems
Routing, slippage, fees, latency, and infrastructure.
10 chapters · 1.1 hr total
- 01
Order Routing: How Your Trade Actually Gets to the Market
The path from your click to a filled trade has multiple steps, each with its own costs and risks. Understanding the routing layer is what separates expensive execution from clean execution.
7 min read
- 02
Trading Infrastructure: What You Actually Need (And What You Don't)
Pro traders run elaborate infrastructure. Most of it isn't needed at retail scale. Knowing what infrastructure actually moves your performance prevents over-engineering.
7 min read
- 03
Latency and Execution Quality: When Milliseconds Matter (And When They Don't)
Latency affects execution quality but most retail strategies don't depend on it. Knowing when latency matters, and when it's irrelevant, keeps you from optimizing the wrong dimension.
7 min read
- 04
Fee Optimization: How Active Traders Recover Material Edge by Cutting Fees
Trading fees compound across thousands of trades into substantial annual costs. Active fee optimization can recover 20-50% of total fee spend, material money that adds to net returns.
6 min read
- 05
Trading Automation and Bots: When to Automate (And When Not To)
Automation lets your strategy run without your attention. Done well, it removes emotional execution problems. Done badly, it amplifies bugs and broken strategies at scale.
7 min read
- 06
API Trading Introduction: How to Connect Code to Exchanges Safely
Trading via API unlocks automation, custom analytics, and faster execution. The setup has specific safety requirements that protect you from the worst failure modes.
7 min read
- 07
Monitoring and Alerts: How to Notice When Something's Wrong Before It Costs You
Effective monitoring catches problems early. The right alerts prevent disasters; too many alerts produce noise. Designing the system is what makes monitoring actually useful.
7 min read
- 08
Redundancy and Failover: Surviving the Outages That Eventually Happen
Every system fails eventually. Trading systems that survive failures keep operating; ones that don't survive lose money on every outage. Designing for failure is what separates the two.
6 min read
- 09
When to Build vs Buy: Choosing Tools That Actually Save You Time
Building custom tools is satisfying but expensive in time. Buying existing tools is fast but constrains how you work. The right choice depends on what your edge actually requires.
6 min read
- 10
Security for Traders: How to Not Lose Everything to a Hack
Crypto security failures wipe out years of trading gains in minutes. The basics, done well, protect against most realistic attacks. The basics aren't optional.
8 min read