hg
The board / Gated

Trading agent

Lab · August 2026 paper trading only US equities

The model reads the filings. It is not allowed near the buy button.

Rails

  • aloneReadsSEC EDGAR filings and market data.
  • aloneWritesProposals to Postgres, orders to a paper account.
  • with a personMoneyPaper only. The client is guarded in code.
  • not allowedPublicTalks to nobody.
  • aloneUnattendedsystemd keeps it running.
  • a person, every timeDecidesProposals are read by a person.

Problem

Language models are good at reading filings and bad at being trusted with an order ticket.

The design keeps those two jobs in separate processes, and keeps the second one deterministic.

System

Claude reads SEC EDGAR filings and writes proposals into Postgres. A deterministic strategy owns the order path and places orders with an Alpaca paper account. By default a paper order is placed. If configuration ever says live, the client refuses: it is paper only in code.

Decisions

  1. No LLM on the order path. The strategy is deterministic and testable.
  2. The Alpaca client is paper-only and guarded in code. A config change cannot make it live.
  3. Python 3.13 and Postgres 17 under systemd on DigitalOcean. Boring on purpose.

Stack

Python 3.13, Postgres 17, Alpaca (paper), Claude, systemd, DigitalOcean, Next.js 16