ClockCross: Evidence-Gated AI Options Agent

ClockCross is an autonomous, evidence-gated AI options agent built on Alpaca. Before the U.S. open, it estimates COIN's expected move from recent BTC/COIN behavior and looks only at the unexplained residual. A trade is considered only when that signal survives chronological evidence, live confirmation, options-chain feasibility, bounded AI adjudication and deterministic risk checks. The AI can choose continuation, reversion or abstain. It cannot choose the symbol, contracts, size, risk budget or exit policy. ClockCross uses Alpaca MCP only for read-only market and brokerage context, while execution goes through Alpaca's Trading API using defined-risk MLeg paper orders. Execution is intentionally narrow: COIN only, 7–21 DTE vertical debit spreads, one contract, fresh quotes, fixed loss limits and a fixed 60-minute research horizon. Ambiguous orders are reconciled before any retry, and every decision is written to a durable ledger. If the evidence is weak or execution conditions are unsafe, ClockCross does not trade. The project is also designed to reject its own ideas. Its research preserved losing regimes, found and corrected one structural spread-selection defect, and rejected an apparently better second-model policy when it failed fresh replication. The first real competition episode completed the full autonomous Alpaca paper-trading lifecycle and finished in a terminal CLOSED state.