Automate your trading

SleeveFolio can run your strategies for you: score your symbols every morning, then turn the scores into paper orders, sized to your budgets, screened by your caps, with you holding a one-click stop at all times. This page chains the whole setup in order. Each step links to its full article.

The checklist

1. Connect paper Alpaca keys (Settings → Broker). Automation places orders through your own brokerage account, so this is the one hard prerequisite. Paper keys start PK: practice money, zero risk.
2. Pick your universe: the list of symbols SleeveFolio scores. The onboarding wizard seeds it; edit it any time on the Universe page.
3. Build your strategy mix (Settings → Strategies), and you always have at least one strategy in it. You start with the moderate All-Weather Blend preset at 100%, which ranks and trades from day one; one click adds any other preset to your mix. By default SleeveFolio splits your funds across the mix automatically (tune that preference on Risk & Caps), and the Strategy allocations table shows what share each strategy trades — turn auto-allocation off to set the percentages there yourself. So this step is optional: change the mix only if you want a different blend.
4. Review your budgets and caps (Risk & Caps). Sleeve budgets decide how much of the account each bucket (stocks, crypto, cash) may hold; the dollar and count caps bound every order the engine may place. Tune these before switching automation on. They are the guardrails it obeys.
5. Enable auto-execute (Settings → Strategies). Type ENABLE AUTO to confirm. It takes effect on the next daily run. Full mechanics in Auto-execute.
6. Watch the first run. Your signals refresh at 12:00 UTC before the open (you can also refresh them anytime with Run now, which never trades), and auto-execute acts on them once the US market opens. Orders the engine places appear on the Orders page marked with an auto- order id, a run summary lands in your in-app notifications, and every decision is written to the audit log.

What the engine does each day

After your signals refresh, the engine checks its gates (switch on, trading not paused, no unresolved reconciliation drift, a difference between SleeveFolio’s records and your broker’s), then closes positions whose signal turned sell and any holding that hit a stop-loss (each closes in full, in one order, biggest loss first), trims winners that reached a take-profit, and tops up buy-ranked names weighted by how strongly each scores: a higher score earns a larger share of each sleeve’s budget. Run several strategies and each one makes this same pass on its own ranking, inside its own slice of the account, selling only what it bought. Every buy passes the per-trade cap, the per-day cap, and the daily trade-count cap — risk-reducing sells never draw from the daily budgets (a take-profit trim is still size-bounded by the per-trade cap); the drawdown brakeblocks new buys (never sells) when tripped. One executed run per day, at most — plus, for crypto holdings only, an hourly sell-only protective checkthat the same switch turns on, so a stop-loss on a 24/7 coin doesn’t wait for tomorrow.

Staying in control

Disabling automation is one click, no typed confirmation on the way off. The kill switch (Pause / Cancel open / Liquidate) stays one click from every screen and always wins over the engine. The checklist above sets up automation on your paper account. Start there and trust a few runs first. A separate Live auto-execute switch points the same engine at your real Alpaca account; it is off by default and gated behind a Pro plan, two-factor, live trading already switched on, and a typed confirmation plus a fresh authenticator code. The full mechanics are in Auto-execute.