Advisories
Advisories, Sentry Labs bulletins on the security and integrity of automated trading systems: risk controls, kill-switches, credential hygiene, tenant isolation, market-data integrity, and audit trails. Educational, not investment advice.
Audit trails and reconciliation for trading systems
When something goes wrong at machine speed, the record is all you have. Building tamper-evident audit trails and reconciliation that prove what your system did.
Protecting the strategy: your real intellectual property
A trading edge is stolen more often through leakage than espionage. Guarding the strategy, its parameters, and its footprint, from the code repo to the order book itself.
Market-data integrity: stale, spoofed, and dropped
A strategy is only as good as the prices it believes. Guarding the market-data path against staleness, gaps, and manipulation before it drives a single order.
Tenant isolation in a multi-strategy platform
When many strategies and clients share one execution platform, isolation is a security control, not a convenience. How to stop one tenant from harming another.
Incident response for a compromised account
The worst time to design your response is during the incident. A calm, ordered playbook for the first hour of a suspected account compromise, contain, preserve, recover.
Engineering a kill-switch you can trust
A halt button is worthless if it fails in the one moment you need it. What it takes to build a kill-switch that flattens risk reliably, even when the system is broken.
Change management for live trading systems
Most trading incidents are self-inflicted, a deploy gone wrong, not an attacker. How staged rollout, canaries, and fast rollback keep a code change from becoming a loss.
Securing API keys and exchange credentials
An automated trading system lives or dies by the keys it holds. Scoping, storing, and rotating exchange credentials so a leak cannot become a liquidation.
What separates institutional algos from retail bots
The gap between a hobby trading bot and an institutional execution system is not the signal, it is everything around it. A look at what actually distinguishes the two.
Latency, slippage, and why microseconds matter
Latency is not vanity engineering, it is a direct input to fill quality and cost. How microseconds turn into slippage, adverse selection, and real P&L.
Backtesting that survives live markets
Most backtests are optimistic fiction. What it takes to build a simulation whose results actually track live trading, order-book replay, queue position, and honest costs.
Risk controls every trading system needs
Automated trading turns a small bug into a large loss at machine speed. The pre-trade gates, kill-switches, and monitoring that any serious system should enforce.
Execution algorithms explained: TWAP, VWAP and beyond
How large orders actually get worked into a market without moving it. A plain-language tour of TWAP, VWAP, POV, and implementation-shortfall execution algos.
Withdrawal whitelists and secure payouts
Trading limits protect the position. Withdrawal controls protect the exit. Why the payout path deserves its own defences, allow-lists, delays, and out-of-band approval.
Signing orders: message authentication on the wire
An order is an instruction to move money. What stops one from being forged, altered, or replayed in flight, and why authenticity is a separate problem from encryption.
Supply-chain risk in your trading stack
Your system is only as trustworthy as the code you did not write. How a poisoned dependency or build pipeline becomes a position in your book, and how to close it.
The insider threat on a trading desk
The most dangerous access is the access you granted on purpose. How firms contain the trusted insider, malicious or merely careless, without grinding to a halt.
Multi-factor authentication that actually holds
Not all second factors are equal. Why SMS and app codes still fall to a good phishing page, and what phishing-resistant authentication changes for a trading account.
Phishing and social engineering against traders
The most reliable way into a trading operation is not the network, it is a person having a busy day. How targeted deception works, and the habits that defeat it.
How trading accounts actually get drained
Accounts are rarely lost to some cinematic zero-day. They are drained through a mundane chain of small failures. A field guide to the real path an attacker takes.
