June 29. Finandy was running my $ETH strategy: enter on a signal, exit by take profit or stop. The last signal came in the morning. At 15:01 the stop fired — and Finandy instantly opened a new position on its own. Then again. Each time I closed it, it reopened, and the size grew: $100, then $300, then $600.
Turning the hook off didn't help. Only one thing stopped it: deleting the API key on the exchange.
Damage: −$12.67, most of it fees for all those market entries and exits. Cheap — because Telegram alerts made me look in time.
The day in numbers: 33 trades, 4 winners, $10.59 in fees.
Our best explanation: the platform kept the signal "alive" after a stop and kept re-entering, unless a "close position" option was enabled — nothing in the docs said it was required.
Finandy itself wouldn't let me close those positions, so I closed them on the exchange directly. Support used exactly that to reject my claim: "we don't review positions traded through an external interface." :) In September Finandy shut down for good.
What every third-party bot user should know. An API key without withdrawal rights is the standard advice, and it's right — it protects you from theft. It doesn't protect you from a bot that goes rogue: with trading rights alone, it can burn a deposit through fees, market orders, leverage — and positions opened against the market. My loop had 2x leverage and growing size. Without Telegram alerts, −$12.67 could have been the whole account. So: trade from a sub-account with only the money you're ready to lose, use isolated margin, turn on alerts — and know that your real kill switch is deleting the API key on the exchange, not a button in the app.
Why my own bot now. A platform is a black box: you can't see its state, you can't fix it, and its support decides whether it was your fault. My own server bot checks the real position on the exchange before every order — and if something goes wrong, I can read the code and change it. Don't trust any platform with what you can't change yourself.
#UKAlgorithmicCryptoTradingAppsMayNeedFCAAuthorization #TradingBot #DCABot
Not financial advice.