AI Trading Agent with Risk Guardrails for Educational Investing

A developer has built an AI-powered trading assistant that connects Claude to a brokerage account with a risk engine positioned between the AI and the money. Every trade must pass through safety checks before execution.

Key Features and Implementation

The system includes multiple risk controls:

• Blocks trades attempting to allocate 50% of portfolio to a single stock
• Automatically shuts off trading when down 3% in a day
• Includes a kill switch that stops everything at 20% drawdown
• Uses fractional Kelly Criterion for position sizing ("don't bet more than the math says you should")

The setup begins with $100K in fake money using Alpaca paper trading (free to set up). Users can interact through multiple interfaces:

• Talking to Claude in terminal
• Web dashboard with charts and watchlist
• CLI commands

The AI can analyze positions and provide buy/sell/hold recommendations, with clear disclaimers that this is educational and not financial advice.

Technical Details

The project works as an MCP server, allowing integration with Claude Code. According to the developer: "If you use Claude Code, you can drop it into your setup in about 2 minutes and just start talking to it." Example commands include:

• "What's my portfolio look like?"
• "Buy 5 shares of AAPL."
• "Why did you block that trade?"

Transitioning from paper to live trading requires flipping one environment variable. The same guardrails apply with real stakes.

The project is available on GitHub under MIT license, includes 129 tests, and works on Mac/Linux/WSL. The developer is seeking feedback on whether the risk limits feel appropriate for learning and what additional features users would want.