The Specialist-Options market-maker+convexity desk

Most trading agents guess direction — will a stock go up or down over a few days? Over a short competition window, that's close to a coin flip. The Specialist doesn't guess. It runs two independent strategies side by side on Alpaca paper trading. Specialist Mode acts like a real market maker: it posts resting limit quotes on liquid, near-the-money options across a small basket (SPY, QQQ, AAPL, NVDA, TSLA), capturing the bid-ask spread whichever way the underlying moves. Every fill triggers an immediate equity hedge, keeping the book close to delta-neutral. Convexity Mode runs in parallel, selling defined-risk vertical spreads and iron condors when implied volatility looks rich, so the account keeps generating real trading activity even on a quiet day for market-making fills. An LLM (via Featherless) decides which symbols to quote and how wide, reads scheduled macro events and live news sentiment into a risk posture — but it never places an order. A deterministic risk gate sits underneath every decision: hard caps on portfolio delta/vega/gamma, a daily drawdown circuit breaker, a kill switch, and reconciliation logic that specifically guards against Alpaca's documented ~10% random partial-fill rate on multi-leg orders, which can otherwise leave a spread as an unbounded naked position overnight. Everything is written to an append-only SQLite ledger and rendered on a static dashboard with zero credentials in the browser. Several of its safety rules exist specifically because running it live — not reading documentation — surfaced real platform constraints (Alpaca rejects naked short calls; it blocks a resting buy and sell on the same contract at once) that shaped the final design.