Frequently asked questions

The one closest to the venue you are trading, because every entry and exit is a round trip to that venue's API. The right answer differs per venue, and it is not always the region nearest to you.

Polymarket International: eu-west-1 (Ireland). This one is measured and it is not close. From an instance in Ireland the order book responds in about 55 milliseconds; from North America the same request takes roughly 320 milliseconds. Our own production instance runs in Ireland and its built-in latency probe reads 27 milliseconds at the median. If you trade this venue, deploy in Ireland.

Kalshi: us-east-2 (Ohio). Kalshi's API resolves to an AWS load balancer in us-east-2, so an instance in that region reaches it without leaving Amazon's network. Measured from Ireland the same endpoint takes about 249 milliseconds against roughly 125 milliseconds from North America, and co-locating in us-east-2 improves on both.

Polymarket US: a US region, us-east-1 unless you learn otherwise. We are being straight that this one is reasoning rather than measurement. Its API sits behind a content delivery network, so a latency probe is answered by whichever edge is nearest and tells you nothing about the path to the venue itself. It is a US-regulated venue, so a US region is the sound default.

Two practical notes. You can only launch in regions the Marketplace listing offers, so check the region selector before planning around a specific one. And if you trade more than one venue, run separate instances near each rather than one compromise region: the venue is selected per instance and applies on restart anyway.

They answer different questions, and from version 1.0.7 they say so explicitly.

The Trade Log shows the live best bid for an open position, tagged bid. That is the price a sale would actually execute against right now, so it is the number to judge a manual exit by. Portfolio Value marks positions at the midpoint between bid and ask, the conventional way to value a book you are not selling this second.

On a market with a wide spread the two differ noticeably, and the bid is always the more conservative of the pair. Neither is wrong. If you are deciding whether to close a position, read the bid.

Your positions did not lose value. Before 1.0.7 the Trade Log valued open positions at a mark price refreshed every five minutes from an indexed data source. It now uses the live bid, which is both current and more conservative, so unrealized P&L on open positions reads lower than it used to by roughly half the spread on each position.

Realized P&L on completed trades is unchanged. What changed is how open positions are valued, not anything that happened to your money.

bid in green means a live quote from the venue, with its age beside it once it is more than a moment old. Amber text such as mark 4m old means the live quote was unavailable and DRADIS is showing the last stored mark, with its age, so you can judge how far to trust it. mark, age unknown means the position has not been priced yet, which happens briefly after one first opens.

The principle is that DRADIS should never show you a stale number dressed as a fresh one.

The dashboard asks the venue every few seconds while you have open positions, and a repeat request inside a short window is answered from memory rather than re-asked. That window is Position Quote Freshness in Setup, Deployment, and defaults to two seconds.

Raise it if you run many positions at once and do not need second-by-second prices. Lowering it means more requests to the venue, not more accuracy than the venue itself publishes.

Yes. Once ghost mode is off and the venue account is funded, the strategies enter and exit without asking. To stop it, in order of reliability: stop the instance, stand the squadron down from its page, or switch ghost mode back on.

Resting orders can outlive the engine, so after an emergency stop check your venue account for open orders. From 1.0.7 the Polymarket International build cancels its own on a clean shutdown.

It is telling you. Every idle strategy reports the specific gate holding it back, on its squadron page and in the Console. Common ones are a spread too narrow to cover fees, a market too close to expiry, a book imbalance that would make an entry adverse, or no market of the right kind being open yet.

A strategy sitting still is reporting a reason, not failing.

DRADIS was built by a longtime Battlestar Galactica fan. On the show, DRADIS (Direction, Range and Distance) is the battlestar's detection and tracking system, the screen the crew watches for contacts before anything is in sight. The engine borrows the show's vocabulary throughout: signal feeds are Raptors, strategies are Vipers, and a deployment on a market is a squadron.

The name fits the job. The engine watches many signals at once and acts only when something real shows up on the screen.