Underwriter / decision replay
Live evidence
Underwriter / decision replay
Live evidence
Selling an option is underwriting insurance. This agent writes defined-risk credit spreads on a fixed ETF universe, and every position's worst case is known before entry. What follows is the money, the book, and the day.
Account equity, the day measured against session-open equity, and open risk against its aggregate cap. Anything the agent could not establish is shown as unknown — never as a zero, because a zero here would read as "flat" and quietly disarm the loss stop.
Every position is a two-leg vertical: a short leg that collects the premium and a long leg that caps the loss. Maximum loss is width minus credit, known before entry and bounded. Nothing here can lose more than the figure in its own row.
What the last cycle ranked, and what it decided about each name. The ratio is implied volatility over realised — how much the market is charging for insurance against what has actually been happening. A high ratio is a candidate, not a trade: the regime filter, the catalyst veto and every risk gate still stand between it and an order.
A live counterfactual at a 1.05 volatility ratio beside the 1.15 execution policy. It uses the same chain, liquidity, spread, regime, catalyst veto, sizing and exits, but never creates or submits a broker order.
One session's activity. A day of no fills and many refusals is a working day, not a broken one — the refusals are enumerated in full on the decision ledger.
The official figure is what the paper broker reports. The shadow figure is what the same trades are worth after crossing the quoted spread. They measure different things, so they are drawn separately and never added together.
Account equity as the broker reports it. Paper multi-leg fills simulate against modified indicative quotes on the Basic plan, and the fill model is undocumented — this is a number we report, not one we trust.
The same fills repriced with explicit slippage: exits marked across the quoted bid/ask rather than at the paper engine's price. Lower by construction. This is the honest figure, and the one to judge.
Why two numbers. Underwriter runs on the free Basic plan: IEX equity data rather than consolidated SIP, option trades delayed fifteen minutes, and indicative option quotes rather than OPRA NBBO. Alpaca's paper engine checks a spread's marketability against those altered quotes, and the multi-leg fill model is not documented anywhere.
A paper P&L built on that is a plausible number with an unknown error bar, so the conservative series sits beside it and the gap between them is left visible rather than reconciled away.