Harpy Trade is the flagship installer and the oldest module in the suite. It watches the US equities market on a dual-clock: a fast position monitor every 5 minutes (Sonnet-class, cheap to keep hot) and a deep scanner every 45 minutes (Opus-class, heavy research pass). When the market is closed, both clocks idle.
What it scans
The scan pass reads the current watchlist, the operator journal, yesterday’s targets, and the regime state (VIX bands, macro flip flags), then fetches price action, fundamentals, news catalysts, and — if configured — Pelosi-household disclosures, SEC filings, and congressional-trade feeds. It forms a shortlist, sizes each position, and writes the resulting targets to the scanner’s local output folder.
What the monitor does
The monitor reads the same targets plus your current Alpaca positions and walks each one: is the thesis still intact, did anything catalyst break, has the stop-loss line been hit, is the 5-minute relative strength saying to scratch the trade? If the monitor decides to act, it queues the instruction locally; the executor picks it up and sends the order to your broker.
Regime awareness
Trade was the module where we learned to distrust backtested strategies. The current version carries a regime-state file that downgrades every thesis when macro indicators flip (VIX > 30, yield curve disinversion, credit spread blowout, etc.). It doesn’t stop trading, but it halves sizing and tightens stops until the regime mellows. The operator can override from the dashboard.
Daily rollover
At 06:45 ET on weekdays a separate task runs the rollover — yesterday’s journal is archived, stale targets are expired, overnight news is pre-read, and a fresh operator journal entry is drafted. By the time the market opens at 09:30 the scanner has already run two cycles and has an opinion.
What it won’t do
- It won’t trade after-hours or pre-market without an explicit override.
- It won’t carry a position over the weekend if the weekly thesis has degraded below the confidence floor.
- It won’t scale into losses. Adds come only off a new catalyst and a new thesis.
- It won’t trade shorts unless the dashboard explicitly enables them. Defaults to long-only.
Trade ships paper-first. To go live you flip the Alpaca base URL in the keys wizard, confirm a preflight checklist, and the same scanner starts writing to the live account. The scanner doesn’t know whether it’s paper or live — that’s a deliberate choice.