AlphaGate: Autonomous Options Trading Agent

AlphaGate is an autonomous options trading agent built on Alpaca's Trading API and MCP server. It runs unattended: a deterministic screener scans 30 liquid names for momentum breakouts (price move beyond 0.5x average daily range, relative volume above 1.5x, confirmed by EMA/Supertrend/RSI trend filters), Claude Opus 5 judges which of the pre-filtered, liquid option contracts is worth entering, and a separate deterministic risk layer has final veto power - the model can never bypass position sizing, spread, delta, DTE, or exposure limits. All trades are long calls and puts only, no naked or covered writing. Sizing is capped at 2% of equity per trade, 10% total options exposure, 5 concurrent positions, with account-wide daily-loss and drawdown halts. Because Alpaca's options API has no broker-side stop-loss or take-profit (bracket/OCO orders are equities-only for this asset class), the agent manages every exit itself: a premium-based stop and target, an underlying-price stop and target, and forced exits ahead of expiry or the competition's close. Every decision the agent makes, including every skip, is logged with its reasoning for full auditability. Disclosure: infrastructure, screener, risk gates, execution, and exit logic were built before the hackathon window and are tagged at commit pre-kickoff-baseline in the repository history; fixes, the duplicate-entry risk gate, and hardening made during the event are visible in the commits after that tag. The agent has been trading live from the official $100,000 competition account since Monday 09:30 ET, with real filled trades and a positive running P&L, visible on the linked Alpaca paper account.