@john_ho80

PACA is a paper-trading options agent built for the Alpaca AI Trading Agents Hackathon. Every five minutes it scans a whitelist of liquid underlyings, computes momentum indicators (RSI, ATR, MACD histogram, EMA distances) and fires events such as gaps, breakouts, and MACD crosses. Deterministic gates filter out exhausted or already-held names. An LLM, or Claude in manual mode, then reasons like a disciplined momentum trader and picks at most one vertical debit spread per prompt, or passes. Code handles screening, sizing, risk caps, mechanical exits, and order placement. The LLM never bypasses those safety controls. Each cycle is journaled and published to a live dashboard.

🌎 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.