Not financial advice. This is a research and paper-trading project. Any numbers here are examples from past data, not promises, and the rules come with no guarantee. Paper trade first and decide for yourself.

This is part 1 of a short series about a small project I run in Claude: a rule-based, paper-first watch over a handful of US ETFs. I turned it into a starter pack so a friend can copy it.

What it does

The project watches a fixed list of US ETFs, computes signals from daily bars, keeps paper-trading books, and reports every weekday. That is all. It is a checker and a bookkeeper, not a trader.

The most important rule is the first one: it never places orders. No task, skill or script places, changes or cancels an order, on paper or live. If a signal says buy, I place the order by hand in my broker app and then tell Claude about the fill so it can be logged and checked against the rules.

The rules I keep

• Report only. Claude reads and reports. I enter every order myself.
• No order without my explicit words. “Looks safe” or “it is only paper” is not approval.
• Paper first. Several weeks on paper with every signal logged and no rule breaks before any live step, and any live trial starts small.
• Never fill numbers from memory. If a data call fails, the report says so on the first line and leaves the affected rows alone.
• Check every backtest against the settings used. Costs, slippage, balance, position size, date range and symbols. If the tool ignored costs, add them by hand.
• One connector environment at a time. The broker connector serves paper or live, never both. The daily tasks run on paper.

The pieces

The starter pack has six parts: project instructions, two scheduled tasks, three skills, the strategy rule files, a spec for a dashboard I call the Desk, and a few small Python helpers that use only the standard library.

In the rest of the series:

1. This overview.
2. The two daily tasks: Close Loop and Open Check.
3. The stock books: SWE breakout and TREND-HOLD.
4. The optional option-spread books, and why they are off by default.
5. How to set it up yourself.

The starter pack is a public GitHub repo: ierturk/trading-project-template.