Small Weird Failures That Are Eating Your Lunch: Basis Trade Edition
A basis trade is a market-neutral strategy where you buy an asset in one market and sell it in another to capture the difference between the two prices, often including funding.
On paper, it can look beautifully simple:
Buy one leg. Sell the other. Capture the spread and/or funding rate. Stay hedged. Profit. Rinse and repeat.
Then reality gets involved.
One leg fills. The other takes its time. Funding moves. An order vanishes. One system says you're flat while another has developed a completely different interpretation of reality.
Maybe the trade ends up hedged anyway. Great. Now explain how.
Before long, you're digging through exchange history, logs, databases and spreadsheets trying to answer one stupidly difficult question:
What actually happened?
In the second public AckTrace demo, I'll build and break a simple cross-venue basis trade to show how execution and account-state failures appear in real trading systems, and how AckTrace reconstructs them.
This is for anyone who trades or builds around cross-venue strategies, market-making, or execution infrastructure — if you've ever had to explain why a "hedged" position wasn't, this is for you.
We'll look at things like:
legging risk and incomplete hedges
missing or delayed execution events
orders and positions that disagree across systems
funding and balance inconsistencies
what happens when the current state looks reasonable but the path that produced it does not
AckTrace sits downstream of execution and reconstructs the event trail behind orders, fills, balances and positions so you can see not just where the system ended up, but how it got there.
There will be a live demo, a few deliberately ugly failures, and Q&A afterward — one hour, live, with a recording shared afterward if you can't make it.