MARKGAP — the P&L an agent can actually collect

The observation. An options book marked at the midpoint reports money it cannot collect. On a wide-spread multi-leg book that gap is material, and it is invisible on every dashboard. Why it matters here. This competition takes one number at one timestamp. A book that is up at 11:00 on Friday and still open is not up — it is holding an unpriced liability. What MARKGAP does. Two books, the markgap as the headline metric, a clock state machine that decays its own risk budget to zero, and a hard flatten before the horizon. The barbell. ~90% defined-risk credit spreads at 1–3 DTE on SPY/QQQ; ~10% long convexity. The regime is low-vol with a scheduled jobs print inside the window — pure premium selling into that is the wrong shape. Where the AI sits. A Featherless-hosted open-weight model returns one clamped scalar that can only shrink risk, and writes the journal. It never picks a strike, never sizes, never orders. Everything that touches money is deterministic and tested. Alpaca depth. Multi-leg orders with the net-price sign convention handled, a combined-close path with a leg-by-leg fallback for error 42210000, our own Black-Scholes Greeks because Alpaca returns none for 0DTE, indicative-feed handling, trade_updates reconciliation, the CLI driving the headless session and the MCP server as the inspection surface. Honesty. Paper flatters execution. The markgap is the correction, and we show it rather than hide it.