A pattern found across three independent trading bots — including one I run myself.
A stop-loss at -7.5% sounds like a hard guarantee. It isn't, unless the price it's measured from is the price your order actually executed at — not the price the bot glanced at a few seconds, or a few minutes, earlier.
This gap — between the price a bot decides on and the price it actually gets — is one of the most common bugs I run into auditing live trading systems. It's not exotic. It doesn't look like a bug when you read the code casually. It only shows up when you trace one specific value across the full path from signal to fill.
The pattern
Almost every bot has a moment where it reads a price, makes a decision, and then waits — for an order to route, a swap to confirm on-chain, a limit order to fill. The wait can be 200ms or it can be five minutes. Whatever price the bot used to set its protective stop-loss/take-profit was captured before that wait, not after.
