Samreen Mohammad@Samreen560

Retail traders and algorithmic developers face a massive challenge: digesting hundreds of breaking financial news headlines in real-time without emotional bias. Building automated pipelines that bridge unstructured news, LLM reasoning, strict capital risk gates, and broker API execution is traditionally complex and error-prone. Sentinel AI Trader solves this by introducing a 5-stage autonomous pipeline. First, it continuously ingests fresh market headlines and catalysts. Second, it leverages the blazing speed of Groq's Llama 3.3 70B model to analyze the sentiment and output a strict, structured JSON signal (determining Call/Put, Strike Price, and Confidence). The most critical component is the third stage: The Risk Gate. Before any order is placed, Sentinel audits the AI's signal against configured capital constraints, maximum portfolio concentration limits, and contract caps. If the AI's confidence is too low or the parameters are unsafe, the order is killed. If it passes, Sentinel generates the precise OCC Option Symbol and natively routes the market order exclusively to the Alpaca Paper Sandbox API. We built Sentinel with dual-stack parity: a Python data-science backend and a dynamic React/Vite web dashboard. To fulfill the hackathon's CLI requirement, we successfully embedded a fully interactive Alpaca CLI Terminal directly into our React UI, translating raw commands into real-time API requests. Sentinel demonstrates that bridging unstructured world events with strict, risk-gated execution APIs is the future of autonomous trading.

🌎 Online Hackathon | 💻 Dates: 28 August–4 September 2026 | 🏆 $6,000 Prize Pool Build AI trading agents on Alpaca — autonomous agents and trading apps using Alpaca's Trading API, MCP server and CLI. 🌍 Fully online hackathon. Join and build from anywhere in the world.