Aperture: a desk that fires its own strategies

Most "AI trading agents" are one model call wearing a hat: imagine a trade, decide it is safe, place it. Aperture splits that into roles that can disagree, because a desk where nobody can say no is not a desk. Four agents hold real decision rights. Scout picks the day's universe from implied versus realised volatility and the news, but only from a vetted liquid list. Regime sets the posture. Red Team argues against every proposal, seeing the structure but not its author, and needs a concrete objection to kill. Portfolio Manager ranks survivors by conviction, which scales size downward only. One component holds the veto, and it is not a model. Before an order exists, a deterministic Risk Warden reduces every leg to expiry payoff geometry and computes worst-case loss. One uncovered region is an automatic veto. It refuses stale quotes, wide markets, thin depth, concentration, a 3% daily loss and an 8% drawdown. The agents never emit a strike, a price or a quantity. Across the scored window it refused 75 proposals and the Red Team killed 29 more. Both Alpaca surfaces are used for what each is good at. MCP is the eyes, and the only one reaching news; it tags its output untrusted and Aperture honours that, so a headline is data, never a prompt. The CLI is the hands: synchronous, exit-coded, idempotency-keyed, submitting atomic multi-leg orders. Strategies are employees. Realised return per dollar of risk earns budget; repeated vetoes count as miscalibration before money is lost. Two of the four sleeves were fired mid-week for that reason, autonomously. The result we are proudest of is a refusal. A 27-configuration sweep found a variant at +20.0% edge, t=4.89, clearing a multiple-testing bar that rises with every variant tried. On an embargoed holdout it had never touched, it scored t=0.95. It was not promoted. Three research runs, 24 trials, zero promotions. Final scored result: $98,918.89, -1.081%, reported at the official close rather than a later revaluation.