Cortex Agents and Marketplace
Beyond chat, Cortex lets you build autonomous agents: give one a strategy, risk rails, and a schedule, and it scans the market, stages trade ideas, and trades a simulated paper book you can audit trade by trade. The best agents can be published to the community Marketplace.
The Cortex section has five surfaces: Chat, Builder, My Agents, Marketplace, and Approvals.
Building an agent
The Agent Builder is a four-step flow:
1. Pick a base
Start from a preset or strategy template - the base decides which tools and data the agent leans on.
2. Teach it
Add custom instructions (up to 2,000 characters): selectivity rules, setups to look for, setups to skip. This is also where scan rules come in - the rule builder lets you define conditions and test the rule against the latest market snapshot before saving, so you know it matches something real.
3. Set the rails
The risk step - and the most important one:
- Mode - the agent runs in paper (simulated) first; promoting to live is a separate, deliberate step
- Approval mode - full auto within rails, or review mode where every idea waits in Approvals for your OK
- Sizing model and starting balance - how positions are sized against the paper book
- Allowed instruments and expirations - restrict what the agent may touch (down to 0DTE or not)
- Drawdown kill-switch - automatic pause on daily loss limits
- Weekly schedule - which sessions the agent works, in your timezone
An authority summary shows exactly what you've authorized before you save.
4. Publish
Optionally list the agent on the Marketplace with a public description (up to 500 characters) and tags for strategy, instruments, and vibe.
My Agents
Home for your agents: current status, performance at a glance, pause/resume, open the detail view, or jump back into the Builder to edit.
Agents pause themselves when something is off - and tell you why:
| Status | Trigger |
|---|---|
| Paused: Idle | 14 days with no signals |
| Paused: Drawdown | Sustained cumulative losses over many signals |
| Paused: Daily loss | Daily kill-switch tripped |
| Paused: Broker offline | Live broker session lost - reconnect and resume |
Agent detail
Open an agent for five tabs:
- Overview - config, authority, and current state
- Performance - the full stat sheet by period: P&L, win rate, trade count, plus drawdown, hold time, streaks, and risk-adjusted return
- Paper - the paper trade book: every simulated signal with entries, exits, and P&L, split into open positions, closed trades, and everything else. Updates every 30 seconds while open.
- Activity - the agent's recent runs and decisions
- Executions - real broker fills routed by this agent in live mode (empty until live execution is active for the agent)
Judge an agent on its paper book over a meaningful sample - not on one hot week.
Approvals
If an agent runs in review mode, its trade ideas queue in Approvals instead of executing. Each row shows the proposed intent and an expiry countdown - approve or reject before it lapses. An expired idea simply doesn't trade.
Review mode is the recommended way to learn what your agent actually does before granting more autonomy.
Marketplace
The community exchange for agents:
| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Browse agents | Community-published agents with descriptions and tags |
| Leaderboard | Agents ranked by performance |
| My listings | Agents you've published |
| Subscriptions | Agents you've subscribed to |
| Account controls | Marketplace-wide settings for your account |
Subscribe to a listing to follow an agent. Check its performance history the same way you would your own - sample size first.
Live execution status
Agents trade paper by default. Live execution is rolling out in stages - behind broker binding, canary limits, drawdown kill-switches, and approvals - and is not yet generally available to all members. When your account is eligible, promoting an agent to live is an explicit step in the Builder's rails section, never automatic.
Paper results do not guarantee live results: fills, slippage, and timing differ with real orders.
Next Steps
- Cortex Quick Start - chat and presets
- Ready-made custom prompts - instruction blocks to teach your agent
- Workspace - attach an agent to your workspace tiles