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Custom Broker Production Checklist

Use this checklist to move a custom broker from "works in demo" to "production-ready".

1. Authentication and Connectivity

  • Separate credentials by environment (paper/sim/live)
  • Run startup health checks and expose observable connection state
  • Implement heartbeat and reconnect strategy
  • Define retry policies for network jitter, auth failures, and broker throttling

2. Order Submission and Idempotency

  • Use client_order_id consistently and keep submissions idempotent
  • Return existing broker_order_id on duplicate active submission
  • Make cancel requests idempotent
  • Cover full order lifecycle states: Submitted/PartiallyFilled/Filled/Cancelled/Rejected

3. Reports and State Sync

  • Implement on_order/on_trade/on_execution_report callbacks
  • Ensure reports carry both client_order_id and broker_order_id
  • Implement recovery sync via sync_open_orders/sync_today_trades
  • Handle out-of-order and duplicated reports safely

4. Risk and Protection

  • Add pre-trade checks (order size/value, exposure, frequency limits)
  • Add price guards (deviation bands, price-limit checks, tick-size validation)
  • Add trading-session guards (reject outside trading session)
  • Preserve normalized reject_reason for risk rejections

5. Reconciliation and Consistency

  • Run intraday reconciliation for orders, trades, positions, and cash
  • Generate end-of-day reconciliation reports with diff markers
  • Alert on critical diffs and support manual intervention workflow
  • Define conflict priority between strategy state and broker state

6. Monitoring and Alerting

  • Track core metrics: place success rate, cancel success rate, report latency, disconnect count
  • Track latency buckets: order RTT, report handling latency, strategy callback latency
  • Define alert levels: P0 (cannot trade), P1 (state mismatch), P2 (performance degradation)
  • Keep structured logs with client_order_id traceability

7. Testing and Drills

  • Unit-test normal, error, reconnect, and duplicate-submission paths
  • Replay historical broker event samples
  • Stress-test deduplication and callback processing under load
  • Drill failures: network outage, delayed reports, partial fills, broker restart

8. Release and Rollback

  • Roll out gradually with small capital, small symbol set, short windows
  • Keep a fast fallback switch to paper mode or safe-stop
  • Arrange release-window on-call and realtime monitoring
  • Keep rollback binaries/config snapshots ready

9. Minimum Go-Live Gate

  • 100% pass on critical-path test suite
  • At least one full trading day without unresolved state diffs
  • No unresolved critical alerts
  • Rollback plan is tested and executable