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Hi r/algotrading
first of all. Do not ask for the bot. I am not selling anything. I just want to share what i learnt answer questions and hopefully also learn from more experienced trader.s
I've been building a bot that copies profitable hyperliquid wallets for a few months. wallet selection, sizing, exits, the whole thing. it went from bleeding daily to roughly breakeven-and-improving, and basically every improvement came from learning one of thes the hard way.
1. copying a profitable trader loses money by default. i matched every copy to the source wallet's outcome on the same trades: they made +0.5% per trade at 69% winrate, my copies made half that at much lower winrate. the gap is exit timing, so better wallet picking fixes nothing until the exit engine mirrors theirs.
2. entry latency is a red herring. my median detection lag was under a minute and simulating zero lag barely moved the numbers. all the leak was on the exit side. optimize exits first
3. handle position fragmentation or your exits fire years early. wallets scale in with multiple fills, and each fill can show up as its own position row. my bot closed the copy when one fragment closed while the wallet still held the rest and an 84% winrate wallet produced 12% winrate copies. only close when the wallet is net flat in that coin and direction. that one fix took copies in that strat from 21% to 82% winrate.
4. a normal stop loss cancels the copied edge. the source holds through drawdowns, your stop realizes their drawdown and then misses their recovery. i re-scored my stopouts against each trade's max adverse excursion 8 of 9 would have recovered if the stop had been wider. catastrophe-only stop plus a trailing stop for profits
5. polled stops make paper trading lie about your losses. an illiquid coin gapped 66% through a stop that live would have filled near the trigger, because live uses resting exchange orders and my sim checked price on a loop. model your actual live order types in the sim or every wide-stop experiment looks worse than reality and you revert good changes.
6. winrate comparisons under a few hundred trades are noise. detecting a 5 point winrate edge takes roughly 1500 trades per arm. judge experiments on dollars per trade with a bootstrap confidence interval instead
7. checking your experiment daily and stopping when it looks good inflates false positives to 20-30%. thats not a discipline problem, its math: repeated peeking invalidates fixed-sample p-values. e-values (always-valid sequential tests) let you look every day and act the moment a threshold crosses, no penalty.
8. feedback automation can deadlock itself. my auto-scaler demoted a strategy, which pushed position size below the exchange minimum, which rejected every order, which meant zero closed trades, which meant it could never produce the trades required for re-promotion. any rule that gates on an outcome it can also block will eventually lock up. audit for that loop before shipping.
9. infra monitoring is not outcome monitoring. process running, api healthy, disk fine, and the bot placed nothing for five days. add assertions on outcomes: signals arrived and some executed, every live position has its stop order actually resting on the exchange, exit mix matches what the strategy config implies. write one for every incident you hit.
10. some traders are uncopyable no matter how skilled. anyone flipping positions in minutes gives a copier guaranteed negative edge,
a weak benchmark validates whatever you want to believe. my random-entry control traded too rarely at a different size, so beats rando" was statistically meaningless. the control needs the same volume and sizing discipline as the strategies it judges.
tldr: copying profitable traders is an exit-fidelity problem, not a wallet-picking problem. and most of what looked like edge was measurement error.