The health check
Last heartbeat, uptime, the practice-account check, whether the broker is reachable, the last error and the next step, counting down.
It runs itself. Safely.
A self-running trading bot for a practice account. It lives on a tiny cloud server nobody can log in to, and reports to a private Control Room on its owner's phone.
What the Control Room is
It trades. You watch.
The bot trades a practice account on its own, around the clock. About once a minute it reports to the Control Room, and the owner watches it all from a phone. The bot never opens a door: it speaks, the room listens, and only the owner can look.
01 · the botPrivate cloud server
Runs on its own. No inbound connections, and it can only call an allow-list of hosts, including the practice broker's API.
signed, numbered snapshot · about once a minute
02 · the roomControl Room Worker
Checks the signature, throws away anything older than what it has, keeps the newest in a small database and works out the light.
build progress, pulled from GitHub
03 · the ownerPhone home screen
Reads three small endpoints every 15 seconds behind a one-time-code sign-in. No buttons trade or change anything.
Snapshots carry only an approved set of fields, never keys or account numbers.
Control Room · live
A green light you can trust.
One glance answers the only question that matters: is it alive and behaving? The light stays green while heartbeats arrive, turns amber when they go quiet and red on a real problem.
The real Control Room, running locally on demo data. Watch the heartbeat land, the health check count down and the owner's pause switch flip.
Inside the room
Every panel, real.
Screens from the actual Control Room with every value swapped for demo data.
Every step, ticked off
The run's steps in order, marked done or waiting, with a day picker to look back and the AI analyst's notes.
Mission control
The objective, a live T-minus to the next milestone and a card for every play, lit active, armed or off.
The build, live from GitHub
Gates, milestones, recent changes with their checks and reviews, tests, and what needs doing next.
Quiet means amber
No heartbeat for a few minutes and the light changes on its own. Nobody has to notice a silence.
Paused, from outside
The owner's switch lives where the bot can only read it. The room shows it; it never changes it.
Built safe first
Six layers between it and trouble.
These came before a single decision was written, and every snapshot confirms them.
- Practice money, enforcedIt refuses to start unless it is talking to a paper-trading account, and keeps checking. A mismatch blocks everything.
- A kill switch out of its reachThe owner's pause switch lives in a separate private place the bot can only read, so it can never change its own controls.
- No way inThe server accepts no inbound connections, and outbound traffic is limited to an allow-list, with a test that fails otherwise.
- Signed, one-way statusAbout once a minute it pushes a signed, numbered snapshot to the room, so a late or replayed one can never overwrite a newer one.
- Secrets never shownKeys and account numbers are masked in every log and report, and every action is logged with its time and reason.
- An AI that only takes notesAn AI analyst writes observations, and cannot touch orders, keys or controls.
Restarts on its own
A service manager brings it back within seconds after a crash, and a watchdog catches a hung process.
Runs for nothing
Standard-library Python on a free-tier server, with the room on free tiers too.
Leaves no trace
When the run ends, the server, the room, its database and every token are deleted.
The chronicle
Guard rails, then wings.
Built in an autonomous mode with its own review rules, one gated stage at a time.
- 01Stage one
Planning gate
The spec and rules, read back and agreed before any code.
- 02Stage two
Scaffolding
Repositories, local checks and the cloud server created.
- 03Stage three
Core bot
Order handling, safety guards, owner controls, logs and reports.
- 04Stage four
Decision engine
The bot's own decision-making, plus the note-taking AI analyst.
- 05Stage five
Research-driven extras
Extra modules, each behind an owner switch.
- 06Stage six
Control room
The owner-only status page with signed snapshots.
- 07Stage seven
Forward test
A week of untouched practice runs, compared against a simulator.
- 08Stage eight
Home-screen control room
Installable on Android, with one sign-in a month.
- →Coming next
Hands off
The run plays out with emergency fixes only, then everything is torn down.
PaperHawk trades a practice account only and never real money. Nothing on this page is investment advice. How it decides what to do is kept private. All Control Room values shown are demo data; the pause banner and switch panel were set up for this demo to show what the owner's controls do.
Automation, done right
Need something that runs while you sleep?
Bots, schedulers and watchers with the guard rails, logs and kill switches to match.
Next door
→
Chore Champs