This is one from a bot I run myself, not a client audit — but the same shape shows up often enough in code I review that it's worth writing up on its own. "Backtest looked fine, live looks worse" usually gets diagnosed as slippage or a broken exit. This one wasn't either. The stop-loss and take-profit fired exactly where they were supposed to. The problem was one line above that: what "reward" and "risk" actually meant once real costs were counted. What the setup was supposed to be ...