-- ACondor LLC, developer of an automated options trading platform for tastytrade accounts, has published details of how its platform turns a live stream of market headlines into a directional bias that its trading engines can act on. The design keeps a strict separation between reading the news and trading on it: an AI classifier scores every headline, but deterministic rules decide what happens next. Platform details are available at https://acondor.com/
Why most mechanical premium sellers ignore the news
Systematic options sellers have traditionally avoided headlines on purpose. News is noisy, arrives at random hours, and tempts a trader into discretionary decisions that a rules-based strategy was built to eliminate. The cost of that discipline shows up on directional trades, where a bull call spread or bear put spread needs a reason to pick a side. ACondor's answer is to make the news itself mechanical: ingest it, score it, decay it, and only let it register once the evidence clears a threshold.
Step one: ingest headlines before the wires
ACondor connects to the TradingNews websocket stream from https://tradingnews.press/, a real-time market news data service built for trading agents. The feed delivers thousands of headlines a day across equities, commodities, and crypto, often minutes ahead of mainstream outlets. Each article lands in a rolling 48 hour buffer that the rest of the platform reads from, with a REST backfill on cold start so a restart never begins blind.
Step two: classify every headline
Every incoming article passes through a Claude model that returns a sentiment of bullish, bearish, or neutral, a confidence score between zero and one, the tickers involved (mapping company names to symbols), a short summary, and whether the impact is company specific, sector wide, or macro. The classifier never places or closes a trade. It only produces structured data that the rule engine consumes, so a single misread headline cannot move money on its own.
Step three: build a bias that headlines cannot whipsaw
The directional bias for a symbol is not the last headline. Each classified article casts a signed vote, positive for bullish and negative for bearish, scaled by its confidence. Articles below a minimum confidence do not vote at all. Votes fade with a twelve hour half-life, then sum per symbol, and the net total must exceed a threshold before a bias registers. Two fresh opposing headlines net toward zero and produce no bias. A morning of consistent bullish flow is not erased by one weaker or older bearish story. The result is a lean that reflects the weight of recent evidence rather than the timing of the most recent story.
Step four: hand the bias to the rules
The bias feeds two places. The Directional Engine, which is off by default and operator enabled, uses it to select defined-risk debit structures in the direction of the lean at 45 to 60 days to expiration, and only when the bias is strong. The news gate runs before every engine's exit rules on open positions and uses a confidence ladder: flag, reduce, or close, with the reduce tier halving the open contract count rather than exiting outright. Iron condors respond to strong news in either direction, while single-sided structures only respond to opposing news. A price-agreement guard requires the underlying to have actually moved with the headline since entry before the gate fires, so bullish news on a stock that is falling does not close a condor.
Every decision is logged
Each bias reading, gate decision, and resulting order records the rule that fired and the inputs behind it, so an account holder can trace a trade back to the headlines that shaped it. Combined with circuit breakers, per-account loss limits, and expiration day safeguards, news-driven bias becomes one more input to a system that never trades on discretion.
ACondor is in early access for tastytrade account holders. ACondor is trading software, not investment advice. Options trading involves substantial risk of loss, and past behavior of any strategy does not guarantee future results. More information is available at https://acondor.com/
Contact Info:
Name: Robin Lilly
Email: Send Email
Organization: ACondor LLC
Address: 2521 North Main Street, Las Cruces Unit 1-276, Las Cruces, New Mexico 88001, United States
Phone: +1-575-312-9326
Website: https://acondor.com
Release ID: 89202528