Nicholas is named after a real Maltipoo who sleeps on a desk, supervises nothing, and is somehow always underfoot at the exact moment something important is happening. The software is a crypto trading bot with the same energy: attentive, rule-abiding, and deeply unwilling to let the house burn down.
He connects to your own Alpaca account, with your permission, and follows a fixed set of rules on a schedule. He does not have hunches. He does not read forums. He has never once said "trust me on this one."
You keep the account. You keep the money. You can stop him mid-thought and he will not sulk about it.
Classic V2 learns, from every trade it and its siblings make, which setups actually make money after fees, and only buys those. When it is unsure it takes a few small practice trades instead of guessing big. Long quiet stretches are normal: it is waiting for odds it has earned.
Every engine wears the same collar: a stop-loss on every position, size derived from how far away that stop is, a cap on total exposure, and a circuit breaker that halts new buys after a rough day and refuses to reset itself. A human has to do that bit. On purpose.
He can place and cancel orders. He cannot deposit, withdraw or move funds anywhere at all. Not a promise — a property of the permission you grant.
You approve him on Alpaca's own login page. No API key is ever typed into this thing, sent to it, or stored by it. He never sees it.
Revoke him from your Alpaca dashboard any time. You do not have to ask, and there is nothing on this end that can argue.
Nicholas does not predict the future. Nobody does, including the people who say they do. He is a rules engine, and rules engines lose money sometimes — his engines have been tested on months of real history they never trained on, and none has yet shown a reliable profit after fees, which is exactly the sort of thing you should be told before you hand something your account rather than after.
He starts on a paper account — pretend money — and stays there until a human deliberately moves him. The work of making him actually good at this continues, and is going about as fast as you would expect for one person and one dog.
Open the control-panel link you were given — the long one ending in
/portal?t=…. If it stopped working, the likeliest cause is the link
arriving cut in half: chat apps truncate long URLs, and the part after t= is the
part that matters. Paste just that piece here and it will let you straight in.
No link at all? Ask whoever set this up — they can issue a new one in a couple of clicks. Nothing on your Alpaca account changes either way.
By invitation only. If you have a sign-up link, open it and it will walk you through connecting your own Alpaca account. If you do not, he is probably asleep anyway.