TailGuard AI: Autonomous Options Insurance

Most trading agents optimize for returns. TailGuard optimizes for survival. A user defines a maximum portfolio loss and hedge budget in plain English. TailGuard reads the connected Alpaca Paper account, market clock, QQQ price, and live indicative options chain. A deterministic optimizer—not the language model—selects the contract symbols, expiry, limit debit, and quantity. It rejects naked risk, stale or unusable quotes, excessive bid/ask spreads, premium-budget violations, inactive accounts, and expiries outside policy. The winning defined-risk spread is transformed into a valid Alpaca multi-leg order payload and staged, not submitted. The dashboard then exposes the account state, market source, scanned-contract count, candidate count, payoff limits, policy gates, and complete JSON audit receipt. The production build deliberately keeps `ALLOW_PAPER_EXECUTION=false`, demonstrating a fail-closed boundary between AI interpretation and financial execution. This makes TailGuard useful as a safety layer for retail portfolios, adviser tooling, or any autonomous trading system that needs explainable downside protection.