NewsFlow Trader

NewsFlow Trader is an autonomous LLM-driven trading agent built for the Alpaca AI Trading Agents Hackathon. It reads financial news headlines about a configurable watchlist of 10 tickers (AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, TSLA, AMZN, META, GOOGL, JPM, XOM, SPY), runs each through GLM-4.6 via z-ai-web-dev-sdk for structured JSON sentiment ({label, score, confidence, reasoning}), passes every proposed trade through a configurable risk guard (max positions, max position %, sentiment threshold, paper-only enforcement), and submits approved orders to Alpaca's Trading API in paper mode using @alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api v4. The pipeline runs in a Bun mini-service on port 3003 that streams every decision as a typed socket.io event to a live Next.js 16 dashboard. Judges watch TICK → NEWS → LLM → ORDER → FILL events arrive in real-time alongside the positions and P&L they generate. The dashboard ships with sliders to tune the watchlist, tick interval (15–300s), max positions (1–20), max position % (1–25%), and sentiment confidence threshold (0.30–0.95) live. The risk guard hard-refuses live orders and blocked 8 orders during our live run, including SELLs on positions the agent didn't hold and BUYs that would exceed the 5-position cap. We verified the agent end-to-end against a real Alpaca paper account during market hours on Aug 28, 2026. The agent autonomously submitted 13 paper orders that filled at real market prices (incl. 1 SELL that closed an NVDA long on bearish news), opened 6 concurrent positions, and generated a machine-readable proof artifact (download/live-trading-proof.json) with every filled order's order_id, filled_avg_price, created_at, and filled_at plus a full account snapshot. The build also includes a 2:43 demo video, 1280×720 thumbnail, 4-minute judge walkthrough script, and a live dashboard screenshot. Mock Alpaca + mock news fallbacks kick in when no API keys are set, so judges can clone and run with zero credentials — every other piece works out of the box.