Automate your trading rules without giving up control.

FAMBF is the framework I built for self-directed traders who already have a strategy they trust on their own account, but spend half their week missing signals or talking themselves out of taking them. A signed risk mandate before any code gets written. Real execution that doesn't fall over on reconnects. Logs you can read without a translator. A kill switch on your phone. The money never moves off your exchange, and you walk away with the source code.

Check if my strategy can be automated Read the Bot Safety Checklist

No withdrawal API access

No managed accounts

No return promises

app.fambf.com

SYSTEM RUNNING 2m ago

Daily loss used 23%

Position size 0.45 / 1.0 BTC

Withdrawal API DISABLED

Signals 24h 12 recv · 8 ok · 4 rej

Slippage 1.2 bps

The problem

If you trade your own account, you already know.

By the time you've been at it for a few years, it's rarely the strategy that does the damage. Most of the loss comes from the gap between what the rules say to do and what you actually end up doing at the screen at 3am, or in a meeting, or while the market is moving faster than you can think.

Half the time, the signal fires when you can't act.

You check the chart twenty minutes later and the entry is already gone. Or worse, you're holding a position the market handed you while you were busy with something else. Some weeks this washes out. Other weeks it's the difference between a clean month and one you don't want to talk about.

The slow leak of manual execution.

Closing the winner two ticks early because you got nervous. Hanging onto the loser because surely it'll come back. Skipping the rule today because today, just today, the setup looks different. None of these feels expensive in the moment. Add them up across a year and they're often most of what a working strategy was supposed to make.

Bots that work until the day they don't.

Most retail trading bots ship as compiled code or a SaaS dashboard you can't open. When something goes wrong, there's nothing to look inside. You won't know which filter killed the signal, why your position has suddenly doubled, or whether the system is still talking to the exchange at all. You realise something is off from the P&L, and by then the damage is done.

Letting someone else hold your money.

Custody-as-a-service feels convenient on the day everything is fine. The day to think about is the one when it isn't. The broker freezes deposits, the counterparty bank gets bailed in over a weekend, the exchange decides your jurisdiction has become inconvenient. I lost about ten years of work to one such day in April 2013, which is more or less why this framework exists.

What FAMBF does

A framework, not a bot.

Every engagement goes through the same five stages, in this order. The order matters. We don't compress it and we don't skip steps, even when a client wants to be live by Friday.

01 · WEEK 1

Specification

Your rules written down clearly enough for a junior developer to implement them from your description alone. If they can't be written that clearly, they aren't ready to be automated, and we'll say so before any code is committed.

02 · WEEK 1

Risk Mandate

A short document we both sign before deployment. It lays out your daily loss cap, the maximum position size, how many averaging steps you actually want allowed, and what conditions trigger a hard stop. Nothing in it needs to be exotic. The point is that it exists on paper before any live order is placed.

03 · WEEK 2

Execution Engine

The parts most retail bots get wrong. Idempotent order submission, so the exchange itself refuses duplicates. State reconciliation after every reconnect, including the awkward case where the bot thinks an order failed but it actually filled. Stale signals discarded. Slippage tracked per fill, and trading pauses if it gets ugly.

04 · WEEK 2-3

Staged Launch

Paper first, so we can watch what the system does with nothing at stake. Then shadow mode, where it sees live market data but never sends a real order. Then micro-live at a size that wouldn't hurt to lose entirely. Full size only after micro-live has actually held up, and never on a fixed schedule.

05 · WEEK 3+

Operator Training

Two screen-shared sessions where you learn to run the system yourself. We go through how to read the logs, what the kill switch actually does, and how to change parameters without breaking anything that's running. The most important part takes the most practice: spotting the early signs of drift before the equity curve has to be the one to tell you.

What FAMBF does NOT do

Six lines this framework will not cross.

A lot of what gets sold as "trading automation" comes with promises that age badly. Below is the list of things this framework will not do, in plain language. None of them are negotiable.

We don't hold your funds.

Your money stays on the exchange you already use, in an account only you can log into. The framework can see open positions and place new orders against them. That is the entire surface area. No escrow accounts, no shared wallets, nothing that gets called a "managed" anything.

Withdrawal access is off.

Every API key the framework creates is set up without permission to move funds off the exchange. If the system is ever compromised, whether by an attacker, a leaked secret or a bad library update, the worst case is that positions change. The balance stays where it is.

No return numbers, anywhere.

You won't find an annualised yield, a Sharpe target, or a monthly performance figure in any of our material. Returns are a property of your strategy, which is your responsibility. The framework handles execution, which is what we're actually selling.

No discretionary trading by us.

The system runs the rules your Risk Mandate authorises. Nothing else. We don't take positions for you on a hunch, and there's no one at our end logging into your account to adjust something manually.

The code is yours.

You receive the source code we write for your engagement in plain, readable form. You can inspect it, fork it, or hand the whole thing to a different developer six months from now if you decide to. There's no SaaS dependency to lock you in.

We turn down clients chasing yield.

If the first question on the call is "how many percent per month", that's the end of the conversation. FAMBF is for traders who already know what their strategy does and want to run it with more discipline than they can hold by hand.

"On April 24, 2013, I walked into my office in Mariupol, opened the client-bank for our operating account, and saw minus one hundred thousand euros showing in red. The account had been at Marfin Laiki in Cyprus, which had been bailed in over the weekend. I had spent close to a decade building that brokerage. I closed it a few months later. The six rules above are the direct consequence of that morning." — Pavlo Filianov, Founder

Free resource

The Bot Safety Checklist.

Fourteen questions to run against your own setup, which takes about half an hour. Each one comes from a specific failure mode I've personally watched destroy retail trading accounts in the past year. The PDF is free and there's no email gate. Read it, apply what's relevant, and decide whether your bot has the gaps it covers.

BOT SAFETY CHECKLIST

14 questions that decide whether your automation survives a real market

v1.0 · By Pavlo Filianov · fambf.com

What's inside.

Each question is followed by what the failure mode looks like in practice, what a properly built system does instead, and a score line for tallying up where your own setup actually stands. The list covers reconnect duplicates, stale signals, withdrawal API leaks, slippage drift, missing kill switches, and ten others I've seen in the wild.

14 questions

~3,200 words

Free PDF

Read the checklist

Founder

25 years on the markets.
The last six building the framework.

Pavlo Filianov

Founder, FAMBF · Former professional participant of the Ukrainian stock market · NYSE analyst · Trader since 2001

2001 · Kraków, Poland Met an American trader named Bruno in a hotel one summer. He'd flown across the Atlantic with a satellite dish and three laptops, just to keep trading US markets from his room. That conversation, and the paperback on technical analysis he handed me on his way out, is how I got into the business.
2003 — 2007 Six years of losing money on the markets before I stopped losing money on the markets. Five-thousand-dollar deposits, blown one after another. By 2007 the discipline had stuck, mostly through having had no other option.
2005 — 2009 Traded NYSE equities, options, and futures through Laser Trade and a Lviv-based prop firm. Ran a representation of Art Capital in Mariupol through the Ukrainian privatisation arbitrage years, working both sides of the Illich steel mill share consolidation.
2008 — 2013 Grew Academy of Stock Trading to six offices across Ukraine. Founded Top Capital in 2011, a licensed professional participant of the Ukrainian stock market, with access to NYSE and FX through Deutsche Bank's Cyprus branch.
April 24, 2013 · Mariupol Walked into the office, opened the client-bank for our operating account, and saw minus one hundred thousand euros in red. The account had been at Marfin Laiki, which had been bailed in over the weekend. I wound the firm down later that year.
2015 — present Came back through crypto, mostly BTC and ETH on Binance, Bybit, and similar venues. The rails were new and the counterparty problem looked different enough to start again.
2020 — present Started learning to code in 2020, mostly because I wanted to run my own strategies without sitting inside someone else's black box. What became FAMBF grew out of those years of writing my own execution layer for my own account.

How we work

Three engagements. One framework.

Start small if you're not sure. Most clients begin with the Diagnostic and move into the Sprint once we both agree the strategy is worth automating in the first place.

Start here

Bot Readiness Diagnostic

A short engagement to find out whether your current setup is actually ready for automation. Strategy, rules, and existing infrastructure are reviewed before any code is committed.

$750 – $1,500

One-time · 1 week

Strategy review session (90 minutes)
Rules formalisation assessment
Initial risk map
Bot Safety Score (preliminary)
Stack recommendation
Written go / no-go recommendation

Book diagnostic

Signal-to-Execution Sprint

21 days from a written strategy to a system running on your account at micro size. Includes the full launch sequence through paper and shadow modes before any real money is at risk.

$5,000 – $9,000

21 days · 30 days support included

Signed Risk Mandate
Webhook or signal source integration
Execution engine on your exchange
Paper, shadow, micro-live, live launch
Telegram/email alerts + kill switch
Operator training (2 sessions)
Algo Passport document
30 days of post-launch support

Book intake call

For existing bots

Bot Risk Hardening

For traders who already have automation running. We audit it against the 14-point checklist, then fix the gaps most likely to cost real money in a stress event.

$1,500 – $5,000

2 weeks · scope by audit

Full code and configuration audit
Bot Safety Score (formal)
API/security review
Risk logic review
Duplicate-order + stale-signal protection
Incident protocol document
Prioritised fix list (do now / later / never)

Book audit call

FAQ

What people ask before booking.

Do you take a percentage of profits?

No. FAMBF is fixed-fee work. The fee covers the implementation, the operator training, and whatever months of post-launch support you choose to include. We don't take a percentage of your trading results in any form. If our income depended on your P&L, we'd be under pressure to push for trades that aren't in your Risk Mandate, and that's just not the business I want to run.

Will you have access to my exchange account?

Only the API permissions that are needed to place orders for you. That's typically "trade" and "read". Withdrawal is explicitly disabled on every key the framework uses. You stay in control of the key and can revoke it at any time from your exchange settings.

What if my strategy doesn't actually work?

That's exactly what the Diagnostic is for. If we go through your rules and they can't be written down cleanly, or the historical edge falls apart under a closer look, we'll say so before any code is written. Roughly one in three diagnostic engagements ends with us telling the trader the strategy isn't ready to automate yet. That's a fine outcome, and it saves both sides a lot of time.

How long does a Sprint actually take?

21 calendar days from a signed Risk Mandate to the first live trade at micro size. Specification and the Risk Mandate sit in week one. The execution engine and paper testing fill week two. Shadow mode and the first micro-live trades happen in week three. Promotion to full size depends on how the micro-live phase actually behaves, and is not on a fixed calendar.

Which exchanges and brokers do you support?

For crypto, anything supported by the CCXT library: Binance, Bybit, OKX, Kraken, Coinbase, and most others. For US equities and options we work with Alpaca and Interactive Brokers. For Forex it's typically MetaTrader 5. If your venue isn't on this list, mention it on the diagnostic call and we'll tell you whether it's workable.

I'm based in the UAE / Europe / US. Does that matter?

For software implementation and operator training, jurisdiction is not a barrier. FAMBF is positioned as software and education, not as an investment service. What you do with the framework on your own account is governed by your own jurisdiction's rules, and we recommend you understand them before deploying.

What happens after the 30 days of post-launch support?

There's no obligation to stay on a retainer. Monthly support tiers start at $700 for standard maintenance and run to $3,000+ for private desk arrangements that include SLA, monthly risk reviews, and small improvements as they come up. Plenty of clients also choose to operate the system themselves after the training and only call when something specific needs to be done.

Can I see the source code?

Yes. The code for your engagement is yours. There's no obfuscation and no SaaS dependency that locks you in. The reusable core of FAMBF is licensed to you for use with your own system. Anything we build on top for your specific strategy is yours outright.