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Vig - it never takes a position it can't cover
Vig sells iron condors on SPY, QQQ and IWM through Alpaca's paper account. Before any order is submitted, the structure's maximum loss is computed and reserved. If the account cannot cover it, the order is never sent; uncovered exposure reads zero by construction. THE CLI IS THE EXECUTION PATH. Every read and write goes through the Alpaca CLI, the tool Alpaca built for AI agents and automation pipelines. Each order is submitted twice: once with --dry-run, which renders the exact request without sending it, then again as the identical argv for real. The proof and the order are the same request. Across the window: 4,594 CLI invocations, 48 submissions, 24 dry-run proofs, committed under evidence/. WHY IRON CONDORS. Alpaca's --legs accepts at most four and a condor is exactly four. Only one side can ever be breached, so maximum loss is width minus credit, the structure is self-covering. It is also delta-neutral, the honest posture when the window is too short for a directional edge to be real. EIGHT GATES, EVERY ONE ABLE TO REFUSE: illiquid, thin-credit, position-too-large, bucket-full, book-full, no-wing, inverted, and a news-driven regime check that can only veto. Refusals are shown beside the fills, because an agent that reports only what it did is hiding half its judgement. WHAT HAPPENED. The account finished down 13%. On 2 September at 23:48 a position list call failed and the tick substituted an empty array, which the reconciler could not tell from an account holding nothing. It marked every structure settled and reset reserved to zero book-full, then saw a full ceiling against a book already full, and the agent doubled its position count before the market rallied. Every structure stayed inside its bounded loss and uncovered exposure never left zero; the receipts show it. The per-position guarantee held; the portfolio ceiling did not, defeated by a bug rather than a decision. The failure and the fix are both in the repository history.
4 Sep 2026
