3 Cases Where Fully Automated Trading Still Needed a Human

Making something run automatically and having it actually get handled to completion turned out to be two different sentences This is the English version of a post originally written in Korean for my algorithmic trading system devlog (new tab). I designed this system to judge and trade on its own, without needing human approval for each decision. The order execution and safety-guard layer (new tab) was built around that same goal. Over the past month, though, there were three separate moments where I had to step in and act directly on the live account. Each one failed for a structurally different reason. 1. An allocation rule structurally starved one order I noticed a particular ticker had a sell plan queued for several days running, yet it never actually went out. The system kept nominating it as a sell candidate every day, but the order never reached execution. The cause was the rule that splits the daily trading budget across multiple rounds. This position's order size was consistently larger than whatever sell budget remained that day. No matter how the rounds were reordered, it could never clear. The budget cap itself was working exactly as designed. The problem was that the underlying assumption — "if it doesn't clear this time, it'll clear next time" — never held for this position. New opportunities kept arriving, but none of them was ever big enough. I executed the one blocked order by hand. It was an irreversible sell on the live account. Afterward, I reworked the allocation rule itself so the same starvation pattern couldn't recur. 2. A safety guard confused a snapshot with a cumulative reading On a different day, the opposite kind of failure happened. A guard meant to detect cumulative drawdown wrongly blocked two legitimate buy orders. The index was nearly flat that day, but the loss figure this guard was tracking read much larger. Looking closer, the guard was designed to measure "decline from peak," but the current value it compared against was an intra