Convexity — the agent that cannot buy a wide book

Convexity is an autonomous options agent running on a $100,000 Alpaca paper account with zero live keys. Six stages, tape to exit: live WebSocket prints and OPRA quotes define the universe; a deterministic signal engine fires on volume breakouts; a screener ranks nearest-expiry option flow; a mandatory RiskGate evaluates a fresh bid/ask at order time; Alpaca's Trading API places limit buys at the ask, cancelled if unfilled in 20 seconds; and a pure-code exit stack runs profit locks, bid stops, IV-crush exits and a 15:50 ET session flatten. RiskGate is six deterministic rules on every entry path — signal, agent, or human. Hard spread caps (20% OPRA, 15% indicative, 12% on 0DTE). Priced at the ask, so worst-case notional is computed on what you'd actually pay. One working order per symbol. A daily loss lock counting realized plus unrealized, marked to the bid. Per-symbol cooldowns. A chase guard that cancels into widening markets instead of following them. If a gate fails, the trade does not get a smaller size. It gets a journal entry. On top sits a 15-second observe-analyze-act loop with five guard skills: drawdown, liquidity, churn, exposure, consistency. It can pause entries, lower concurrency, or flatten. It can never arm, trade, or raise a limit. It runs with or without the LLM, so a hung model can never strand a position. What it got wrong is the most useful thing it produced. On September 2 the book lost money on a day when every single trade was legal. All fifteen trade-level gates passed, because each one checks a trade. Nothing checked the portfolio. Every open position was a short call spread — three separate bets that nothing rallies — and the market rallied. Gates that check trades cannot see a book. That is the difference between a rule and a risk system. The desk is live and read-only at convexity.faruqueamin.com/desk. Paper only.