traded — setup 1 of 6

Create your login

This is yours alone. Nobody else — including whoever set this machine up — can see your balances or move your money without it.

Pick a username of at least 3 characters.

Four unrelated words beats a short complicated one — easier to type on a phone and far harder to guess. Write it down somewhere physical.

Use at least 12 characters.
These do not match.

Connect your accounts

Two services. One runs the AI, one places the trades. Paste each key once — after saving they are never shown again, here or anywhere else.

Runs the agents. From openrouter.ai → Keys.

OpenRouter keys begin with sk-or-. Check the paste picked up the whole thing.

The simulated account. This key physically cannot reach real money.

Both Alpaca fields are needed to place any trades.
Where these are kept. Encrypted on this machine, in a file only this program can read. That protects them if the disk is ever taken, copied or thrown away. It does not protect them from someone who already has full control of the machine — nothing running unattended can, because the program has to be able to unlock them itself with nobody here.

How much, and what for

Start on the simulated account. Real money is a separate, deliberate switch later — and this screen never turns it on.

Simulated to begin with. Nothing real moves until you say so.

A percentage of that amount, over the period you mean it. "5%" alone is ambiguous — 5% a month and 5% a quarter are very different things.

% per

Limits it cannot break

These are enforced in the program itself, not asked of the AI. Nothing any agent decides or reads can move them.

The main risk dial — it decides whether one bad pick is a dent or a disaster.

Sells everything and stops until you restart it.

Percent of the starting amount. Halts permanently and emails you.

How it thinks, and when it writes

Changeable at any time in Settings. Nothing restarts.

One report each morning, and anything urgent. Never a message per trade.

That does not look like an email address.

Before you start it

Worth reading once. You can change all of it afterwards.

Trading with $5,000 simulated
Your target—
Which needs—
Most in one stock—
Daily stop—
Permanent stop—
Approach—
Agents running—
Estimated AI cost—
What this is honestly for. It is a test, not an income. The best documented experiment of this idea gave six AI models $10,000 each of real money — four of the six lost money, and the third-placed one lost 42% in seventeen days.
  • It starts on simulated money and stays there until you deliberately switch
  • Every figure it shows you is after fees, spread and the AI's own cost
  • Buy-and-hold is always on screen next to it, because beating it is the only result that counts
  • It is built to be able to tell you no — and that is a successful outcome, not a failure

Set up and running

The agents will do their first research before the next market open, and your first report arrives the following morning.

Simulated money only. Nothing real is at stake. When you want to change that, it is in Settings under Go live — and it will show you how this actually performed before you confirm.