Nine layers of judgment stand between market noise and a single options trade. This is the exact path a decision travels — the same logic running live, every fifteen seconds, on a real paper-trading account.
All 64 watched symbols are re-evaluated every 15 seconds. But before a single model runs, hard rules can veto a symbol instantly. Restraint is the first feature.
Before looking at any single stock, the algorithm classifies the entire market — recomputed every 30 minutes from SPY and VIX — into one of three regimes.
For every symbol that survives the filter, three separate signals report in — each blind to the others.
Two gradient-boosted models score every symbol's odds of a meaningful move — and as of July 2026, they hold no veto over live trades. Forensics showed the trade type they gated couldn't clear its own costs, so the models were benched along with it. They now live in the Lab (Stage 09), fighting nightly duels on data they've never seen — a comeback requires a sustained out-of-sample record, not a good week.
The flagship trade — a sold put spread on SPY or QQQ — only fires when all six conditions click open simultaneously. Most days, at least one stays shut. (A parallel equity leg ran alongside this through mid-2026; retired 2026-07-28 after it never cleared breakeven across hundreds of trades. One strategy, proven, beats two, one of which quietly loses.)
A bought option needs the market to surge before time decay and spread costs eat it — 1,495 trades proved that math (Stage 09). A sold put spread wins in three of four endings: market up, flat, or even slightly down. The seller doesn't need to predict the rally — only that the crash stays home — and is paid up front for a risk that's capped to the dollar.
Only SPY and QQQ qualify — the two chains liquid enough that the exit door is always penny-wide. The system sells the put sitting about one percent below the market and buys another five dollars lower as insurance on the insurance. Worst case is fixed to the dollar before the order leaves the building.
No panic exits — and no greed either. A sold spread's final dollars are its most dangerous: the position is bought back once 60% of the credit is captured, never ridden into expiration. Equities keep their intraday rules and sleep in cash; only the spreads hold overnight.
Every decision is logged with the exact 13 input values at that instant — plus SHAP attribution, showing precisely how much each input pushed the model's confidence up or down.
Every scan of all 64 symbols and every trade's full lifecycle land in a public database; receipts like this one accompany any model-gated entry — the standard every future strategy must meet before it goes live.
The live model is a standing champion, not a finished product. Challenger models are trained on richer pattern features — the shape of the whole day, not just the latest bar: streaks, range compression, position against the morning's range, how long since the day's high, how many times price has chopped across VWAP.
Then comes the duel: champion and challenger score weeks of market data neither has ever seen — re-run automatically every night. No clear win, no deployment; a tie goes to the incumbent. The same discipline killed an entire strategy candidate in one evening: swing-traded calls backtested at +3.3% per trade… until random entries under the same market filter scored +4.0%. All beta, no alpha, zero dollars spent learning it.
Every decision receipt (Stage 08) is also training data. Once enough accumulate, a second model learns which of the bot's own signals actually made money — net of spreads — and vetoes the ones that historically haven't. The strategy starts studying itself.
The trial also caught the champion cheating: its first "win" came from having trained on the test window. Retrained clean, its score fell from 49% to 31%. Every future duel is leak-checked by construction.
Nine layers, 64 symbols, all session long — and overnight, now that every position's worst case is fixed to the dollar before entry. Bullish only, defined risk only. No real money — every trade runs on a paper account, fully logged and replayable.