IV Desk: knows when not to trade

IV Desk is an autonomous options-trading agent that behaves like an insurance company for the stock market. It sells volatility premium on SPY, QQQ and IWM as defined-risk iron condors (1-3 days to expiration), but only when that premium is statistically overpriced (a positive volatility risk premium) and dealer gamma positioning favors it. A deterministic risk engine enforces every gate in pure code, with zero LLM discretion and no path where a broken model response means yes. On top of it sits a four-seat LLM desk (a Quant ensemble, Bull, Bear, and a Desk Head) that debates each opening and writes a falsifiable prediction, logged to a public append-only journal alongside every refusal and the exact number that caused it. Over 60 backtested sessions the deterministic layer found 174 opportunities and traded 11 of them (+$484). In the scored competition window (Mon 31 Aug - Thu 3 Sep), it opened exactly 1 trade - a QQQ iron condor, cleared by every gate and a live debate, closed inside every strike - and documented 295 stand-downs with a reason for each. Ending equity: $100,318.85. Everything runs unattended every 15 minutes via GitHub Actions, executing through the official Alpaca CLI as a single 4-leg mleg order, on Alpaca's paper environment.