Your first live bot: a paper-to-production checklist

The moment a strategy stops being a chart and starts sending real orders is the moment it earns your respect. It's tempting to skip straight there — the backtest looked great, why wait? Because a great backtest and a working live bot are different claims, and the gap between them is exactly where accounts get hurt. Algod is built to make you walk that gap deliberately, one safe step at a time.

The path: backtest, then paper, then live

Every bot should travel the same road. First you backtest against real historical candles to see whether the idea has ever worked. Then you deploy it as a paper bot on live ticks, where it reacts to today's market with fake money — the truest rehearsal there is, because it faces the same delays and gaps you will. Only when paper looks right do you flip the hard mode switch to live. Paper and live aren't a checkbox in the UI; the app itself enforces the difference, so a paper bot is structurally incapable of placing a real order.

The pre-flight checklist

Before you let a bot touch your Kite account, walk this list. If you can't tick every box, you're not ready — and that's fine.

• Backtested across more than one market regime — an uptrend, a chop, and a drawdown — not just the months that flattered it.
• Paper traded for enough live sessions that its behaviour stopped surprising you.
• Fund-per-trade set small — small enough that a string of losses is a lesson, not a wound.
• Pre-trade risk guard confirmed: every order is checked against your per-trade and total limits, and anything oversized is rejected outright, never silently resized.
• Kill switch located and tested — you know the one control that flattens every position and stops every bot in under two seconds.
• Schedule sane — you know when the bot starts, when it flattens, and that the NSE holiday calendar has it covered.

Your first live bot's job is not to make money. Its job is to prove the whole pipeline works while the stakes are small enough to be a tuition fee.

Start with a size you'd be genuinely calm losing, watch the first live sessions closely, and scale only after the bot has earned it with real fills. The safety rails — the hard mode switch, the pre-trade guard, the kill switch — exist because they will one day matter. None of this makes algorithmic trading safe; it carries substantial risk of loss, and you alone are responsible for the orders placed through your account. Go slow. The market will still be there next week.