THE DESK: AI news-to-trade loop for Alpaca paper - Sell Project

A self-improving, news-driven paper-trading loop in one Python file (one dependency: requests). Every 5 minutes it reads the news, checks that volume and price flow agree with the story, sizes against hard risk caps, writes the exit before the entry and journals every fill. Each night a bounded 'autopsy' adjusts its own rules. Runs on Alpaca's free paper account for $0/month. WHAT YOU GET desk.py (about 650 lines): Alpaca News API across a 10-stock + 5-crypto watchlist, with a 22-catalyst weighted, recency-decayed scoring taxonomy Flow confirmation: relative volume threshold plus price direction agreeing with the news Hard caps: 1% equity risk per trade, max 3 positions, 20% notional cap, -2% daily-loss halt Exits pre-written: stocks use bracket orders, crypto gets a resting take-profit plus an engine-enforced stop Fill, slippage and fee logged separately per trade Nightly autopsy: attributes P&L to catalyst tags and tunes weights, min score and stop width within hard-coded bounds, with versioned rules.json HTML report generator, a blocklist so it never trades against your other strategies, and a --selftest order-pipeline check Landing/description page TECH Python 3.9+, requests, Alpaca Trading API (paper) and Alpaca Market Data/News API. The buyer uses their own keys. PAPER-ONLY BY DESIGN The trading endpoint is hard-coded to Alpaca's paper API, and the process refuses to start if it is changed. There is no live-trading flag. WHY IT IS WORTH BUYING It is the viral 'I gave an AI $1,000 to trade' architecture, actually built with real guardrails and honest about costs. It suits algo-trading hobbyists, YouTubers and course creators who want a working, explainable loop to build content or products on. TO LAUNCH pip install requests, put your Alpaca paper keys in .env, then run python3 desk.py --loop. Run at least 30 days on paper before drawing any conclusions. TRANSFER Source zip and git bundle (fresh repo) with SHA-256 checksums Handover guide and due-diligence report 30 minutes of email handover. Payment through Escrow.com No accounts, keys, journals, domains or revenue history included HONEST DISCLOSURES Demo / paper trading only. This is not financial advice and makes no performance claims. THE DESK has no live-trading mode; it is hard-wired to Alpaca's paper endpoint. There is no track record. The seller ran only a tiny ETH/USD paper self-test and no-trade cycles in August 2026. No strategy performance is claimed or implied. The included thedeskreport.html contains synthetic sample data, not results from any account. The screenshots also show sample data. Run it on a dedicated paper account: --flatten closes every position in the watchlist symbols, not only positions THE DESK opened. News and market data come from Alpaca's APIs and are subject to Alpaca's and the news providers' terms. The name 'THE DESK' has not been trademark-cleared; other trading products use it (e.g. Arizet Labs' The Desk). No users, customers or revenue.