No live trading

[AbelGitman]

Hi Ryan,

First off, amazing work on this trading bot — the codebase and documentation are incredibly well-organized. Thank you for making this project publicly available.

I’m running into a small issue when trying to run the bot in live mode. The ingestion process runs without any problems, but the bot never seems to transition into live trading. It appears to remain stuck in the ingestion stage.

Here’s what I’ve verified so far:

I’m running the command: python beast_mode_bot --live

My balance is sufficient (confirmed via the dashboard)

All tests pass successfully

API connectivity and authentication are working with no errors

Additional observations:

From the dashboard under Strategy Performance Analysis → Strategy Comparison Table, I can see capital being deployed and incrementing. It also shows “Open Positions” increasing (currently showing 4). I’ve attached a screenshot for reference. However, “Active Positions” never updates, which suggests the trades aren’t actually executing.

Could you please advise? Thanks so much in advance for your help

Aspiring bot trader

[ryanfrigo]

Thanks for the detailed report and screenshots! A few things to check:

1. Paper vs Live mode: Make sure you're running with --live flag: python cli.py run --live. Without it, the bot runs in paper mode and won't execute real orders.

2. The dashboard showing 'Open Positions' but no 'Active Positions' suggests the bot is finding opportunities and simulating trades (paper mode) but not submitting them to Kalshi.

3. Check your logs for lines like Placing order vs [PAPER] Would place order — this will confirm which mode is active.

4. API permissions: Ensure your Kalshi API key has trading permissions enabled (not just read-only).

If you're confirmed on --live mode and still seeing this, check for any rate limiting errors in the logs — Kalshi throttles order submissions aggressively.

[austin-millan]

Anyone here able to place trades? I'm also stuck in ingestion loop and no trades are ever placed

[marklevin054-ship-it]

My bot is running, I cant get the dashbaord to load, expired timestamps on the web dashboard

[ryanfrigo]

Following up on this thread - it looks like this is affecting multiple users (see comments from @austin-millan and @marklevin054-ship-it).

Pattern I'm seeing:

• Bot runs in ingestion mode ✅
• Health checks pass ✅
• Balance sufficient ✅
• Dashboard shows 'Open Positions' incrementing ✅
• But no actual trades execute ❌

Debugging steps for affected users:

1. Verify command: Ensure you're using (not )

2. Check logs for order attempts:

   Look for vs actual lines

3. API permission verification:

   • Log into Kalshi dashboard
   • Check API key has TRADING permissions (not just read-only)
   • Verify key isn't expired

4. Rate limiting:

If multiple users are hitting this, there might be a code path issue where the bot isn't transitioning from paper to live mode properly, even with the flag.

@ryanfrigo - might be worth adding more verbose logging around the paper/live mode detection and order submission logic.

[ryanfrigo]

Issue Fixed! 🎉

Found and fixed the root cause of this issue. The problem was a configuration bug where the bot was always defaulting to paper mode regardless of the --live flag.

What was happening:

• Bot showed "Open Positions" incrementing (paper mode simulation) ✅
• But "Active Positions" stayed at zero (no real trades) ❌
• Even with --live flag, orders were being simulated instead of executed

Root cause:

The live_trading_enabled setting wasn't properly defined in the configuration class, so all trading strategies were using a fallback value of False (paper mode).

Fix:

Pull Request #13 fixes this by:

1. ✅ Adding live_trading_enabled to the proper config class
2. ✅ Improving logging to clearly show when live vs paper mode is active
3. ✅ Adding troubleshooting docs to prevent this confusion

How to verify the fix:

1. Pull the fix:

   git pull origin main  # (once PR #13 is merged)

2. Test configuration:

   python test_live_mode.py  # Should show correct live/paper switching

3. Run with verbose logging:

   python cli.py run --live
   # Look for: "⚠️ LIVE TRADING MODE ENABLED - REAL MONEY WILL BE USED"
   # And: "💰 PLACING LIVE ORDER - Real money will be used for [market]"

4. Check order execution logs:

   • Live mode: "✅ LIVE ORDER PLACED"
   • Paper mode: "📝 PAPER TRADE SIMULATED"

Thanks for the detailed report with screenshots - that helped identify the exact issue! Let me know if you need any help testing the fix.

Update: Also ensure your Kalshi API key has TRADING permissions (not just read-only) in your Kalshi dashboard.