What broke first when I moved from backtesting to live wasn't the strategy

Summary

• The post is about the operational and infrastructure challenges (execution latency, order handling, low liquidity behavior) that cause failures when moving an algorithmic strategy from backtesting to live trading, not the strategy logic itself.
• The author's thesis is that a significant failure mode in live trading is the "leakage" of a strategy's edge due to poor execution infrastructure, which is often overlooked in favor of discussions about overfitting.
• Quality assessment: This is informed speculation based on personal experience. It is a valuable qualitative insight for practitioners but does not constitute well-researched due diligence (DD) with data.