TradeProof

TradeProof starts where most trading agents don't: with market selection. Instead of a hand-picked watchlist, it begins from Alpaca's full active, tradable, optionable U.S. equity universe — 6,171 symbols — and narrows it with progressively more expensive work. VOLUME REAWAKENING It looks for the second wave of participation, not the first spike: an abnormal impulse, a low-volume contraction that holds support, higher-timeframe clearance, then renewed 5-minute participation. Chasing the first spike buys a move that already happened. MEASURED ON A LIVE SCAN 6,169 equities entered, 6,149 ranked on market data, 282 passed the liquidity floor, 240 selected for 400-day analysis, 237 analyzed, 1 cleared the Edge Score threshold. Liquidity multiplies the first-pass score rather than adding to it, so an illiquid name cannot top the ranking. DETERMINISTIC RISK AUTHORITY 23 gates must all pass before any order — market regime, market clock, corporate actions, options level, buying power, max trade loss, reward/risk, leg spreads, Greeks, daily loss, drawdown, duplicate underlying, position count, trade frequency, resistance clearance, liquidity and frozen-plan integrity. The spread constructor works inside the same budget the gates enforce. The decision layer is bounded to ENTRY / WAIT / REJECT: it cannot pick strikes, set size, raise a limit, or reach a live-trading endpoint. ALPACA LIFECYCLE Assets (has_options), batched bars, News, stock WebSocket wake-up, 5-minute confirmation, option chain with Greeks and IV, account and positions, corporate actions, PAPER MLeg order, trade_updates, Portfolio History, official Alpaca MCP (55 tools), hash-chained evidence. PROVING WHAT IT REFUSED The agent prepared 124 trades and submitted none. Its best run cleared 21 of 23 gates; the one that never confirmed was renewed 5-minute participation — the core of the strategy. Every refusal is logged with the failing gate named. PAPER only. 70 automated tests.