Schmidt Capital

Schmidt Capital is a fully autonomous, defined-risk options book trading XSP credit spreads (0–5 DTE, ~15Δ) on Alpaca paper trading — from morning research to exit, no human in the loop. THE AI: Each morning a research agent (Claude, via the Claude Agent SDK) connects to Alpaca's official MCP server and reads the market — snapshots, news, movers, option chains — plus the macro calendar via web search. It sets the day's posture: delta caps, size multipliers, entry blackouts. Its influence is tighten-only and enforced in code: every recommendation is clamped against config, and order-placing MCP tools are whitelisted out and explicitly banned. On day one it caught an error in our static event calendar (the new Fed Chair's Jackson Hole keynote on kickoff morning). THE RISK MACHINERY: Eight deterministic gates evaluate every order — kill switches, per-trade and portfolio risk budgets with shrink-before-veto sizing, weekend and market-hours rules. Stops and kill switches fire only on sustained, sanity-checked breaches: a data glitch can cause nothing, never a liquidation. All exits are re-pegged limit orders. Validated live: it rode a −$94 dip back to green, stopped positions at 1–2× credit in a selloff, and flattened the book an hour before the deadline so all P&L is realized. THE STACK: Alpaca Trading API for atomic MLEG spreads (buying power verified live to equal defined risk), MCP server as the AI's market surface, the official CLI as an independent equity cross-check, Python + SQLite decision journal + Telegram reporting + a live Streamlit dashboard showing the account and the agent's complete decision journal.