The Daily Strategy Health Dashboard

A firm running even a modest handful of live strategies cannot afford to have someone individually re-derive, every morning, whether each one is behaving normally. There isn't time, and more importantly there's no consistent standard for what "normal" means across strategies with very different styles and time horizons. The daily strategy health dashboard solves this by putting the same handful of diagnostic numbers next to every strategy, every day, so that a reviewer can scan the whole book in minutes and know exactly which strategies need a closer look.

A typical dashboard row per strategy shows: today's P&L and today's P&L versus its expected range given recent volatility; current gross and net exposure versus limits; realized slippage versus the strategy's historical average; number of trades versus the expected count; and a small set of flags — a limit breach, a data feed gap, an unusually large single position, a fill that looks stale. Rows are typically color-coded, green for "within normal bounds on every metric," amber for "one metric outside its usual range, worth a look," red for "something needs attention today, not next week." The point of the dashboard isn't to explain why a number moved — that's what a deeper investigation is for — it's to correctly triage which strategies deserve that deeper investigation at all.

A concrete case: on an otherwise quiet morning, a statistical arbitrage strategy shows P&L within its normal daily range, exposure within limits, and a trade count that is a third of its usual level. Nothing on the P&L or exposure side would have flagged this strategy for review, but the trade-count anomaly does — and it turns out a market-data feed for one of the strategy's traded names had gone stale overnight, silently suppressing signals for that name without breaching any risk limit. The dashboard catches an operational problem days before it would have shown up as an unusual pattern in returns, simply because trade count was one of the handful of metrics it tracks by default.

What this means in practice

The dashboard is deliberately shallow by design — a handful of metrics per strategy, reviewed daily, rather than a deep dive into every strategy every day. Its value is in consistency and speed of triage: the same reviewer, or even a junior analyst, can scan dozens of strategies in the time it would take to properly investigate just one. What it flags still requires human judgment to interpret, and a strategy that's amber for a good, explainable reason (a known earnings date, a planned rebalance) is different from one that's amber for no apparent reason at all — the dashboard tells you where to look, not what you'll find.