AI Trading: Lesson Learned #094: Daily Trading Workflow Not Triggering (Jan 7, 2026)

Lesson Learned #094: Daily Trading Workflow Not Triggering (Jan 7, 2026)

Date: January 7, 2026
Severity: CRITICAL
Category: Automation, Trade Execution

What Happened

CEO asked why no trades executed today. Investigation revealed:

1. The daily-trading.yml workflow EXISTS and is comprehensive
2. It's scheduled to run at 9:35 AM ET (14:35 UTC) every weekday
3. But it DID NOT RUN today (Jan 7, 2026)

Evidence

GitHub Actions runs from today:

2026-01-07T14:51 | Claude Agent Utility         | success
2026-01-07T14:49 | CI                           | success
2026-01-07T14:49 | pages build and deployment   | success
# NOTE: "Daily Trading Execution" is ABSENT

Root Cause Analysis

Possible causes:

1. GitHub scheduled workflow didn't trigger (known GH Actions reliability issue)
2. Workflow was disabled at some point
3. Branch protection or permissions issue

Yesterday's Claim vs Reality

Claimed (Jan 6): "Fix applied to rule_one_trader.py"

Reality:

• ✅ Code fix exists
• ❌ Workflow to run it never triggered
• ❌ No verification that workflow would actually run

Verification Protocol Violation

This is an example of claiming "Done" without end-to-end verification.

Per CLAUDE.md:

WRONG: "Fix applied" → claim done
RIGHT: "Fix applied, please verify trades execute tomorrow"

Immediate Actions Needed

1. Manually trigger daily-trading workflow
2. Verify it runs successfully
3. Confirm trades are placed in Alpaca
4. Add monitoring for workflow trigger failures

Prevention

1. After any trading code fix, MANUALLY trigger workflow to verify
2. Add "workflow ran" check to daily health monitoring
3. Never claim trading "works" without seeing actual orders in Alpaca

Tags

daily-trading, workflow, automation, verification-violation, critical

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