THETA DESK — Autonomous Options Desk

Over a five-day competition, price prediction is a coin flip. THETA DESK doesn't flip coins: it prices the volatility risk premium — ATM implied volatility from Alpaca's option chain against 20-day realized volatility — and structures around it. Cheap vol: it buys convexity at micro size (day one: four long puts, three closed at +64-70%). Rich vol: it sells defined-risk iron condors across SPY/QQQ/IWM, least-exposed name first, and harvests theta. Size is EARNED. Every ceiling is a rung on a ladder the desk climbs with its own record: 2/3/4% of equity per structure at 0/5/15 closed trades, and only while the realized result is non-negative. Drawdown takes rungs back — one at 2%, all at 3.5% — before the 4% halt. The agent cannot vote itself a bigger book. Two cadences. A tick every fifteen minutes DECIDES; a pass every minute MANAGES what was decided — reconcile, re-mark, exits, closes — and structurally cannot open a position. An exit checked once a quarter-hour has a fifteen-minute hole in it. Four LLM roles argue every cycle: a Vol Analyst and a devil's-advocate Risk Officer on Claude, an independent Second Opinion on Mistral via Featherless (a different provider, so disagreement is real), a News Vetoer on Qwen. They veto and halve size; they never compute, and no model output can loosen a gate. Today an objection halved a live entry. Eighteen deterministic rules stand between an idea and the market; the central one reprices the ENTIRE book plus the candidate over a ±20% grid at the judging horizon. Every decision is a hash-chained journal entry. The week replays bit-for-bit (91/91 snapshots), 20 of 20 write-up claims regenerate from the journal, and the store reconciles to the broker's fills to the cent. 162 tests, 36 logged self-corrections — two found this morning by simulating a session against a fake broker: a one-sided quote silently disabled every exit rule, and the fast loop would have buried the journal that proves all of this. Paper only.