We built Calamari to solve our own problem. This is a transparent account of how we use the platform to manage a live, multi-Tentacle prop trading infrastructure — the same infrastructure you get access to when you subscribe.
Running a prop trading operation across multiple funded accounts is not a technology problem that off-the-shelf solutions handle well. Each prop firm account has its own drawdown limit, lot-size ceiling, and instrument restrictions. A trade that is perfectly sized for a $50,000 account is wrong for a $10,000 account. Executing across all accounts manually — or trusting a cloud-based copier with sub-second timing requirements — introduces unacceptable risk.
We needed a system where the copy logic ran locally, on the same machine as every terminal involved, eliminating the external network round-trip between sender and receiver. We also needed that machine to be continuously monitored and self-healing — because prop firm trading does not pause for weekends, and a crashed terminal during a live trade is a real financial event.
We built Tentacle to be that machine. And then we deployed 17 of them.
Our internal operation currently runs 17 Tentacles in parallel. Each Tentacle is a dedicated managed Windows appliance — not a shared environment, not a container, not a VPS slice with noisy neighbours. Each one runs its own isolated instance of Windows, its own MT5 installations, and its own local copy of FX Blue Personal Trade Copier.
Across 17 Tentacles, with up to 7 MT5 terminals per Tentacle (including the master), our infrastructure has the capacity to support over 100 active terminals simultaneously. In practice, the number of live terminals at any given moment depends on how many accounts are funded and active — but the capacity is there, and the architecture scales linearly: adding a Tentacle adds another isolated unit of capacity without affecting any existing Tentacle.
Each Tentacle supports up to 7 MT5 terminal instances running concurrently. One of those terminals is designated as the master — the account you trade from your phone or laptop. The remaining six are receivers, each configured with its own lot-scaling factor, symbol filter, and per-account risk parameters.
This means a single Tentacle can serve a trader running one master account and up to six funded accounts simultaneously. Across 17 Tentacles, that is a potential of 102 terminals — all monitored, all auto-recovering, all copying locally without an external relay.
We use FX Blue Personal Trade Copier for all intra-Tentacle copying. The key architectural decision is that both the sender terminal and all receiver terminals run on the same Tentacle. There is no external cloud relay, no third-party copying service, and no network round-trip between the trade detection and the copy execution.
This matters for two reasons. First, latency: local copy propagation is sub-second because the sender and receivers communicate over the local machine's memory bus, not over the internet. Second, reliability: a cloud-based copier introduces a dependency on an external service that can go down independently of your terminals. Our architecture has no such external dependency in the copy path.
Each receiver is configured independently with its own lot-scaling factor, symbol whitelist or blacklist, and maximum position size. A trade on the master account triggers the copier, which applies each receiver's configuration before placing the order — so a 1.0-lot trade on the master might become a 0.2-lot trade on a $10k receiver and a 2.0-lot trade on a $100k receiver, all from a single master entry.
Across 17 Tentacles running 24/7, terminal crashes are not a hypothetical. MT5 terminals occasionally freeze, disconnect, or exit unexpectedly — particularly after broker-side server maintenance, Windows update cycles, or network interruptions. Without automated recovery, a crashed terminal during a live trade is a position that is no longer being managed.
The Watchdog Controller runs on every Tentacle and polls the health of each terminal every 30 seconds. If a terminal is found to be unresponsive, not running, or in an error state, the Watchdog initiates an automated restart sequence: it terminates any hung process, clears any lock files, and relaunches the terminal with its original configuration. The entire recovery cycle typically completes within 60–90 seconds of the fault being detected.
This monitoring runs continuously — nights, weekends, and public holidays. Our team does not need to be awake for a terminal to recover from a crash at 3 AM on a Sunday.
Process hangs, exits unexpectedly, or loses broker connection
Health check polling cycle identifies the terminal as non-functional
Watchdog terminates hung process, clears lock files, prepares restart
Original configuration applied, broker login credentials re-injected
Broker connection re-established, copy copier resumes, health check passes
With 17 Tentacles running simultaneously, our team cannot physically sit in front of each machine. LiveView solves this: it streams a real-time view of any terminal on any Tentacle directly to a browser, from any location, without requiring a VPN, RDP client, or third-party remote-desktop tool.
In practice, this means we can verify that a specific receiver account on Tentacle 12 has correctly copied a trade — from a phone, from a different country, at any hour — without any special software installed on the viewing device. The stream is secured over TLS and is not recorded or retained.
For a 17-Tentacle operation, this is not a convenience feature. It is an operational necessity. The alternative — logging into 17 separate RDP sessions to audit terminal states — is not a viable monitoring workflow at scale.
Running 17 Tentacles at $199 per month each costs $3,383 per month in total infrastructure. The alternative — provisioning 17 comparable managed Windows environments with equivalent monitoring, auto-recovery, remote access, and MT5-optimised configuration from a traditional managed hosting provider — would cost $500 or more per unit per month, totalling $8,500+ per month for the same footprint.
The $500+ figure is not hypothetical. It reflects the market rate for managed Windows VPS environments with equivalent RAM, CPU, and included management services from providers that target the trading infrastructure segment. At that price point, the monitoring, auto-recovery, and remote access capabilities are often sold as add-ons rather than included by default.
Calamari includes Watchdog monitoring, auto-restart, LiveView, and MT5-optimised configuration in the base $199/month price. There are no add-on fees for the features that make the infrastructure operationally viable.
When you subscribe to Calamari, you are not getting a product that was built for a hypothetical customer. You are getting the exact infrastructure we use to run our own live trading operation. Every feature exists because we needed it. Every edge case has been encountered by us first.
The Watchdog recovery logic was tuned against real terminal crashes on real broker connections. The LiveView architecture was designed around the operational reality of managing multiple Tentacles without RDP sprawl. The FX Blue configuration defaults were set based on what actually works across a range of prop firm account types.
We have skin in the game. Our own funded accounts depend on this infrastructure working correctly, every day, without manual intervention. That is the standard we hold ourselves to — and it is the standard you get when you deploy a Tentacle.
Start with one Tentacle at $199/month. The same infrastructure we run for our own prop trading operation — configured, monitored, and self-healing from day one.