What you need to run ACondor

ACondor is built for tastytrade, today. It uses the official tastytrade OAuth API to authenticate, fetch market data (Greeks, IV Rank, option chains), and place orders. You must have an active tastytrade account. Margin accounts have access to all structures ACondor supports; the naked put used by the optional short put engine also needs uncovered option approval on the tastytrade account and is off until you turn it on, per account, behind a confirmation. IRA and cash accounts are supported: the bot automatically restricts itself to defined-risk structures (iron condors, credit spreads, debit spreads) and never places undefined-risk trades in those account types.

Other brokers are planned through SnapTrade, limited to brokers whose API accepts four-legged orders, since an iron condor is one order with four legs. None are supported yet, so a tastytrade account is a hard requirement for now.

ACondor is not affiliated with tastytrade. This is an independent software tool. The link above is an affiliate referral.

Before ACondor will trade, you set up one alert channel from the dashboard and send it a test. Pick Pushover, which needs a one-time purchase of the Pushover app on your phone, or email, which is free and can go to one or more addresses. This is how you hear about fills, exits, halts, and a broker login that stopped working.

There is no SMS option. No SMS service is free: every carrier charges per message and requires sender registration, and those fees would have been passed on to you.

There is no AI key to get. The news intelligence pipeline runs a small language model hosted in your own Azure resource group. It classifies financial headlines by sentiment, direction, and market impact, and it labels the sector of a company name. The default is OpenAI GPT-4.1 nano. You can switch to GPT-4.1 mini or Anthropic Claude Haiku 5.5 from a priced list in the dashboard. The model is never in the automated trade entry or exit path. All entry and exit decisions are deterministic rules.

The model is used in two places, and they behave differently. The news gate sends headline text only, with no account data attached. The optional chat assistant is a premium service and is off by default. When you turn it on and open it, it can read your positions, settings, and the bot's decision history to answer you, and it can propose an action, for example changing a setting. Nothing runs until you confirm it in the dashboard. See Security for exactly what is sent where.

Your plan includes $10 of model usage a month. The dashboard shows tokens and estimated cost as you go, and usage past the included amount is billed at cost.

The plan is for ACondor to subscribe to a real-time websocket news feed from TradingNews on your behalf, streaming financial headlines to the classifier model on your Azure account for sentiment and impact scoring, bundled into your subscription so you never need your own TradingNews account or API key. That bundled arrangement is still being finalized. During early access, without an active news feed, the news gate and news-triggered entry features are inactive; the bot still trades normally on its scanner-based engines.

The plan is for ACondor to run on infrastructure we host and manage for you: your own dedicated server and your own dedicated database, not a shared multi-tenant environment, with strict separation between your account and every other customer's: no shared server, no shared database, no shared credentials. You won't need to provide, configure, or keep your own server running. That per-customer hosting is still being built out; it is not live yet during early access.

Once it ships, we'll configure everything on the infrastructure side. The things you'll set yourself are your tastytrade connection, your alert channel, and, if you want it, a different classifier model from the Models card. The tastytrade connection is entered once from the dashboard. Starting and stopping the bot will be on you: we'll handle the hosting, but not turning your bot on or off. It'll be a single toggle in the dashboard, not a technical task, and the bot will only trade while it's running, during market hours (9:30 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern, Monday through Friday).

For how your tastytrade credentials are stored, what the bot can and cannot do with your account, and how to revoke its access instantly, see Security.