A multi-broker trading desk with a strategy engine behind it
One console across Questrade and Interactive Brokers: unified positions, a backtested strategy engine, and automated execution with the risk controls wired in front of the order, not behind it.
- Client
- TradeSmart
- Industry
- Financial technology
- Year
- 2026
2 brokers
Questrade + IBKR behind one API
3 modes
backtest, paper and live share one codebase
Pre-trade
risk checks run before transmission
The challenge
Running capital across two brokers means two portals, two data models and two definitions of almost everything. Questrade and Interactive Brokers disagree on how a position is keyed, how partial fills are reported, how corporate actions land and how often you are allowed to ask. Neither is a real-time feed by default.
On top of that sat the hard part: the client wanted strategies to run unattended. Automated execution is easy to demo and unforgiving in production — a stale quote, a double-submitted order or a reconnect that silently drops a fill is the difference between a strategy and an incident.
On top of that sat the hard part: the client wanted strategies to run unattended. Automated execution is easy to demo and unforgiving in production — a stale quote, a double-submitted order or a reconnect that silently drops a fill is the difference between a strategy and an incident.
What we built
We put a normalisation layer between the brokers and everything else. Each broker gets an adapter that owns its own OAuth refresh, rate-limit budget and reconnect behaviour, and emits a single canonical event stream — orders, fills, positions and cash — into TimescaleDB. Downstream, nothing knows or cares which venue a fill came from.
The strategy engine runs the same code in three modes against that stream: backtest over historical bars, paper against live prices, and live against real capital. A strategy that cannot be replayed bar-for-bar in backtest is not allowed to trade.
Execution sits behind a risk gate that evaluates before an order is transmitted, not after: per-symbol and portfolio exposure ceilings, a daily loss limit that flattens and halts, duplicate-intent detection keyed on an idempotency token, and a market-data staleness check that refuses to trade on a quote older than its threshold. Every fill is reconciled against the broker of record on a schedule, and any divergence pages a human rather than being quietly corrected.
The strategy engine runs the same code in three modes against that stream: backtest over historical bars, paper against live prices, and live against real capital. A strategy that cannot be replayed bar-for-bar in backtest is not allowed to trade.
Execution sits behind a risk gate that evaluates before an order is transmitted, not after: per-symbol and portfolio exposure ceilings, a daily loss limit that flattens and halts, duplicate-intent detection keyed on an idempotency token, and a market-data staleness check that refuses to trade on a quote older than its threshold. Every fill is reconciled against the broker of record on a schedule, and any divergence pages a human rather than being quietly corrected.
The outcome
The desk shows one blended portfolio across both brokers, strategies move from backtest to paper to live without a rewrite, and every automated order carries an audit trail from the signal that produced it to the fill that closed it.
Stack
Laravel 13
PHP 8.4
Blade
Tailwind CSS v4
Vite 8
TradingView Lightweight Charts
MySQL (prod) / SQLite (local + tests)
Redis-less DB queues on dedicated training / range-sim / bot-engine connections
Pest 4
Pint
Laravel Socialite
Questrade API
IBKR Client Portal Web API (OAuth 1.0a)
Anthropic PHP SDK
Herd
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