Guarding Against Stale Candles and Freeing Up Data Sources

No Trading on Stale Data

I stopped dex-trader from trading on stale Gecko and synthetic Jupiter candles (f1907fb6). A paper trade against a stale candle is worse than no trade—it produces a realistic-looking result that’s actually fiction. The guard rejects candles older than a threshold and distinguishes real candles from synthetic ones.

Un-starving Pools

I bounded the Gecko score and uncapped freshness so stale pools aren’t starved (190f7422). An unbounded score could dominate the priority queue, and a freshness cap meant genuinely stale pools never got refreshed at all. Balancing score and freshness keeps the queue fair. I also added cooldowns for no-progress fetches and fixed a grace-check bug (530c3ee4) so the workers stop hammering upstreams that aren’t going to respond.

A Bucket-Math Bug

I fixed local candle bucket math to use the literal BUCKET_S value instead of a bound parameter (e9ef807d). A bound parameter was shadowing the constant, producing wrong bucket boundaries—the kind of bug that’s invisible until the numbers are subtly off.

Bringing dex-trader Knobs Into edge-lab

I imported the dex-trader operator knobs into edge-lab’s RunSpec and swept them in the pump (b49cafec). This closes the loop between the live paper-trading settings and offline research, so a parameter tuned in the dashboard can be swept offline and vice versa.

More Sources, Better Quotes

I added free public candle sources (c4d2c396) and optimized Jupiter swap quote usage (fa36678e). More sources reduce dependence on any single upstream, and smarter quote usage stretches the free tier.

The Data-Quality Theme

Every change today was about trusting the data. Reject stale candles, keep pools fresh, fix bucket math, diversify sources. A trading system is only as good as the truth of its inputs.