Automated trading platform

By the TradeAgentic engineering team·Published 30 August 2026·Updated 30 September 2026

Does an automated trading platform mean their servers?

When a product calls itself an automated trading platform, it almost always means a service you log into. The trading logic runs on infrastructure you cannot inspect, your credentials sit in their database, and your access ends when your subscription does. That arrangement is convenient and it moves several risks onto you without naming them.

The alternative is a platform in the older sense: software you take delivery of and run on your own machine, against your own brokerage account, with your own keys.

What does owning the platform change?

Their outage stops being your outage

If the decision-making runs on a vendor's servers, an incident on their side is an incident in your account. When it runs on your hardware, their availability is irrelevant to whether your desk trades.

Your credentials stay in the Keychain

Broker API keys go into the macOS Keychain, are never written to a file by the software and are never sent to RLG. RLG holds no copy of them.

You keep working if we stop

A subscription platform stops when you stop paying or when the company does. Licensed software keeps running. Updates stop, which is the honest trade, but the desk does not go dark because of something that happened to us.

Nothing changes underneath you

On a hosted platform the operator can change how capital is deployed without your approval. Here, nothing changes unless you apply an update. Both models are defensible and you should know which one you bought.

Hosted or owned: how do the two compare?

Neither column is wrong. Hosted is easier. Owned is more resilient and more private. The mistake is buying one while believing you bought the other.

What does the automated trading platform include?

A judgment loop, not a rule runner

The desk forms a view on each candidate, argues against it on the evidence, commits or refuses, then grades itself on what the market did next. Multiple strategies compete for one pool of capital and allocation follows measured results.

Protection that sits at the broker

Protection rests at the brokerage rather than in the software, matched to whatever the instrument allows, and position sizes are computed so it can always be placed.

Reconciliation you can trust

Realized profit and fees are rebuilt from the broker's own record, and positions and protection are reconciled at startup before any new order goes out.

Research you can rerun

A backtester with a real cost model and options repricing, reproducible from one command, included with every tier.

Automated trading platform or algorithmic trading platform?

The two terms are used interchangeably, but they tend to describe different purchases. An algorithmic trading platform is usually a place to write, test and run strategies you design, often in code. An automated trading platform is broader: anything that places trades without you placing each one, including systems that decide for themselves.

If you want to build your own strategies, you are shopping for the first. If you want trading to happen without designing each rule, you are shopping for the second, and the questions on this page matter more. If you are comparing products side by side, how to judge the best automated trading platform is covered on its own.

Does this shape suit you?

It asks for a machine and a decision

You need a machine that stays on, your own brokerage account, and the willingness to run something yourself. A hosted platform asks for none of that, which is its genuine advantage.

It suits people who need to answer for it

Operators and firms who will be asked why the system did something, by an allocator, a trustee or themselves, are the buyers this shape fits. The record and the reproducible research exist for exactly that conversation.

Evaluate it as the full product on paper

Every tier is the whole system rather than a reduced demonstration, and it starts in paper mode, which is the only way to judge a platform honestly before capital is involved.

Questions to put to any platform vendor

What happens to my positions if you have an incident

On a hosted platform the honest answer usually involves your positions being unmanaged while the vendor recovers. Ask for it plainly and ask what protection remains at the broker meanwhile.

What do you do with my trading data

A hosted platform sees every position and every decision you make. Ask whether that is used to improve their product, and what happens to it if the company is sold. Software running on your own machine makes the question moot.

What happens on the day I leave

Ask whether you keep anything: the configuration, the history, the ability to keep trading. With a subscription the answer is usually nothing, which is worth knowing before rather than after.

What should you look for in the contract?

The licensing unit

Per operator, per machine, per account and per entity price very differently. Settle the unit before the number, because this is where disputes start later.

What updates are permitted to change

Whether an update can alter how capital is deployed, and whether you can decline one. Both answers are defensible; not knowing which you have is not.

What you keep at the end

With a subscription, usually nothing. With a license, the software and the record. Establish it in writing rather than assuming.

What can an automated trading platform not do for you?

Decide how much you can afford to lose

Every platform can enforce a limit. None can choose it for you. That number comes from your own circumstances, and it should be set before the first trade.

Make losses impossible

Automation removes hesitation and fatigue. It does not remove risk, and a platform that implies otherwise is marketing rather than engineering.

Replace reading the record

A platform that runs unattended still needs someone to look at what it did. Unattended is a feature. Unread is a failure.

How do you move to a new automated trading platform?

Switching platforms is where positions get left unprotected. Do it in this order.

• Export your trade history and keep a copy outside both platforms.
• Run the new platform on a paper account alongside the old one before switching.
• Set your limits again from scratch rather than copying the old ones blindly.
• Move protection on open positions deliberately, so nothing is unprotected in between.
• Confirm the new platform's figures match your broker's statement before trusting them.