I've been thinking a lot about the gap between "I built a trading bot" and "I understand why my trading bot does what it does." Most algo traders I've talked to have no audit trail for their decisions — the bot either placed the trade or it didn't, and when something goes wrong, reconstructing what happened is a spreadsheet nightmare. I ended up building a pre-trade evaluation layer that checks every signal against a pipeline of risk gates (duplicate detection, daily loss limits, position exposure, price drift, volatility bounds, etc.) and records a trace for every decision. The part that surprised me most was how useful regression testing turned out to be — being able to replay live signals through a new config and see exactly what would change before deploying it. Wrote up the approach here: dev.to/flop95/how-to-add-pre-trade-risk-checks-to… Curious how others handle this. Do you have any pre-trade checks in your pipeline? How do you test config changes before going live with them?