Why Uptime and Infrastructure Reliability Matter for Bot Trading

It's easy to spend all of a strategy's development time on the logic — entries, exits, risk rules, indicators — and treat the infrastructure it runs on as an afterthought. In practice, infrastructure reliability is just as much a determinant of real-world results as the strategy logic itself, because a strategy that isn't running isn't managing open risk either. Consider what happens if a terminal disconnects while a position is open: the position doesn't disappear — it's still live at the broker, still exposed to the market, but the logic that was supposed to manage it (trailing a stop, closing on a signal reversal, respecting a daily loss limit) is no longer running. That's a materially different and riskier situation than simply "missing an entry" — it's an open, unmanaged position with nothing watching it. The failure modes worth planning for include the terminal or the underlying machine crashing or losing power, an internet connection dropping, an operating system forcing a restart for updates, and the broker's own server having connectivity issues independent of the trader's setup. Some of these are outside anyone's control, but the ones within the trader's control — a stable, monitored, always-on environment rather than a home PC — are exactly the ones worth eliminating as a risk factor entirely. This is the core reliability argument for dedicated, monitored infrastructure over a home setup: not that it makes a strategy more profitable, but that it removes an entire category of risk — the strategy simply not running when it's supposed to — that has nothing to do with whether the underlying trading logic is any good, and everything to do with whether it actually gets the chance to prove it.