Connect your Alpaca paper account

Magno validates your keys against paper-api.alpaca.markets, confirms the account balance, and holds the credentials in memory for the life of the session. Nothing is written to disk.

Step 1 · API credentials

Paper keys only, from the Alpaca paper trading dashboard

Where do I find these keys?about 1 minute

Create a free Alpaca account
No funding, no deposit, no identity check needed for paper trading. alpaca.markets
Confirm you are in Paper Trading
Open the Alpaca dashboard. The selector in the top-left corner should read Paper Trading with an account number starting PA. If it says Live, use the chevron on that selector to switch — live keys are rejected here.
Copy your key from the API Keys card
In the right-hand sidebar, find the API Keys card. Endpoint should read paper-api.alpaca.markets. The value under Key — it starts with PK — goes in the first field below.
Press Regenerate to reveal the secret
The secret is never displayed on the dashboard, only once at the moment you generate it. Press Regenerate on that card and copy both values immediately. This invalidates your previous key pair — anything else using the old keys will stop working.
Options are already enabled
Paper accounts ship with options trading on at Level 3, so there is nothing to apply for — spreads and short premium all work. You can change it under Account → Configure if you want to test how Magno behaves at a lower level.
Confirm the $100k balance
New paper accounts start at $100,000. Balances can’t be edited in place, so if you’ve been trading and want a clean baseline, open a fresh paper account from the account-number menu in the upper left. Magno will still run against whatever balance you have — it just flags the difference.

Paper keys only. Live keys are rejected — Magno builds its Alpaca client with paper=True unconditionally and has no code path to a live endpoint. Your keys are held in server memory for the life of the session, never written to disk and never logged.

API key ID

Starts with PK for paper accounts.

Secret key

Sent once to validate, then held in server memory. Never logged, never persisted.

Step 2 · Mandate

Shapes both the model prompt and the deterministic fallback policy

Adaptive variance risk premiumSells premium when IV rank is high, buys it when low, stands aside in the middle. The default.Delta-neutral incomeHarvests the variance risk premium by preferring short premium when volatility is rich. Needs options level 3.Long volatility / convexityBuys options when volatility is cheap relative to realised. Accepts negative theta as the cost of gamma.

Step 3 · Risk envelope

Hard limits. The agent cannot widen these at runtime.

Buy premium when IV rank ≤

Below this percentile, options are cheap relative to how much the stock actually moves.

Sell premium when IV rank ≥

Above this percentile, options are expensive and selling is the edge.

Delta drift cap

Hedge fires once |net Δ| reaches this.

Max bid/ask spread

Rejects wider than 5.00% of mid.

Max allocation

10% of buying power per trade.

Daily loss breaker

Stops new risk at 5% drawdown. Hedging continues.

Max open positions

Concentration cap across the book.

Contracts per trade

Upper bound on what the model may size.

Min days to expiry

Must stay clear of the 21-day exit time stop, or positions close the moment they open.

Max days to expiry

Above this, capital efficiency falls away.

Autopilot starts disarmed. You engage it from the terminal.

No paper account yet? Create one at Alpaca and generate paper keys — options are already enabled at level 3 on paper accounts. Already connected? Go to the terminal.