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How Cavara works

Cavara is Brad Stubbs's personal tool for trading his own brokerage accounts with rule-based stock and options bots. He sets the rules and decides when a bot may trade; Cavara applies them on a schedule and shows every decision. It is not offered to the public, and all trades are in the operator's own accounts.

Effective October 23, 2026

The steps

“You” below means the account owner using Cavara, which in practice is its operator.

  1. Connect your own brokerage account. Alpaca (with API keys you create at Alpaca), moomoo (through the OpenD gateway on your computer), or a brokerage connected through SnapTrade where available. Cavara never holds your money.
  2. Create a bot. Choose a stock and a strategy, then set its rules. Options bots (cash-secured puts, covered calls, or the wheel) use how far from the price to sell, days to expiration, the least return worth taking, position caps, and optional profit-take and stop-loss levels. Stock trend bots buy a fixed dollar amount when the stock is above its 50- and 200-day averages and rising, and sell on a trailing stop or a close below the 50-day average. A rule preview shows what those rules would pick right now, without placing anything.
  3. Every bot starts Off. Put it on Watching first: every 15 minutes during US market hours it checks your rules and records the trade it would have made, without sending anything. Its results show up under Performance as “Watching”, kept separate from real fills.
  4. Switch to Trading when you are ready. This needs a second, explicit confirmation. From then on the bot places limit orders that meet your rules, on your behalf, on its schedule.
  5. Review and approve. On a real-money account, every order that opens a new position waits in Needs your OK with the contract, quantity, limit price and expected credit. It is sent only if you press Approve and confirm. If you do not answer within 30 minutes it expires unsent, because the price it was based on is stale by then.
  6. Watch the results. The dashboard shows balances, open positions, every order with the reason the bot gave for it, closed trades, and performance (realized P&L, win rate, profit factor, drawdown) by bot and by account.

What is automated, and what is not

  • User-directed: you create every bot and its rules, choose its account, and decide whether it is Off, Watching or Trading. Only you can turn a bot on or move it to Trading.
  • Learning: on practice accounts Cavara may fine-tune a bot’s rule numbers (such as its delta range, days to expiration or profit target) from its own closed trades, records every change, and reverses a change that made results worse. On real-money accounts every suggested rule change waits for your approval.
  • Automated on practice accounts: a bot in Trading mode places opening and closing orders on its own, within your rules and limits.
  • Approved by you on real-money accounts: every opening order needs your approval, every time. This cannot be switched off.
  • Exits are automatic everywhere: closing orders from your own profit-take, stop-loss and close-before-expiration rules are sent without waiting, so a protective exit is not missed.

The brakes

  • Stop all trading: one button halts new positions on every account immediately. Exits still go through.
  • Account risk limits checked before every opening order: maximum daily loss, trades per day, open contracts, portfolio exposure, single-position size and risk per trade.
  • Market-hours guard: bots do not open new positions in the last minutes before the close.
  • Limit orders only, priced from the live quote, so a bot never sends a market order.
  • A record of everything: each scheduled check, each order and the reason behind it are kept so you can see why a bot did, or did not, trade. Cavara AI can explain any of it in plain English.

Options involve risk, and Cavara is software, not investment advice. See the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.