Alfred Investments — The Options Desk

The Options Desk is a self-running trading firm with three employees, none of them a person. The Steward (~$70k) sells weekly cash-secured puts on liquid names, premium floor, delta band, mechanical take-profit and stop. The Hunter (~$20k) is Claude working through Alpaca's official MCP server: it pulls positions, bars, news and option chains itself with read-only tools, then must conclude in a strict schema (a thesis under 280 characters), a spending cap, and a falsifier. Anything malformed is discarded whole; proposing nothing is a respected answer. Above both sits the Risk Officer: deliberately plain code, no LLM, enforcing cash-secured-only, sleeve caps, a daily drawdown gate, a concentration cap and an account kill switch that drops the desk to income-only. On day one it vetoed nine of our ten proposed trades (the limits were right) and the universe was wrong, so we changed the universe. The desk runs on GitHub Actions, executes through the Trading API (paper, hard-pinned), reads through the official CLI, and commits its own decision log to the repo after every session — every action and every deliberate inaction explained in a sentence, including reconstructed entries where crashes lost rows, because a diary that hides its gaps is worthless. The week finished down 6.6%: the income sleeve earned, the convex sleeve got stopped out in a reversal market, and every loss was capped by construction. The log is the product.