The daily desk

Updated: 2026-07-25 12:12 CEST

The recurring loop, in the order a trading day runs it. Each command is followed by the decision it supports. Your first session explains what these screens contain; this page assumes you already know and only tells you when to look.

Before the open

ibkr status
ibkr brief

ibkr status answers one question before anything else matters: which broker session am I attached to. It exits 1 when the gateway is not connected, so it also works as a guard in a script.

ibkr brief is the assembled read. It arrives as two movements: Review covers the last completed session (session P&L, attribution by underlying, rules delta, proposals offered against acted, overrides used, capital events, the reconcile clock, working orders) and Ready covers today (regime, breadth, dealer gamma, canary, session state, held-name events, capital tier, drawdown latch, premium at risk, hedge cost per day, policy drift, and the day's artefacts).

Every row carries a status word, and the two families mean different things:

The separation is deliberate: degraded and unavailable never signal a risk condition, and attention never signals a data problem. Each row prints its own reason on the line below it, so a degraded row tells you which source went cold. Stop and fix when the cold source is one the next decision rests on. Trade around it when it is not. Sensors covers freshness states and the safe check for each source.

Where the stamp comes from

Rendering the brief from your terminal also stamps the day's artefact when one is due, and prints the stamp line. The stamp is the act of looking, not a second act on top of it, and there is no checklist to sign.

The mechanics are worth knowing once. ibkr brief --json renders without stamping. An agent-origin invocation prints agent-origin render — not stamped, and the daemon refuses the stamp outright for any non-human origin, journaling nothing, so only a terminal or a paired device can stamp at all. The target is morning first, then end of day, then nothing; --kind morning or --kind eod overrides that choice.

There is no MCP tool for brief. An agent can read the same underlying surfaces, but the brief itself is a CLI and paired-app surface.

Market context

ibkr regime
ibkr canary

ibkr regime gives the broad-market stage. ibkr canary asks the narrower question of whether that state matters for the book you actually hold.

One rule about canary is worth carrying into every session: account-only stress is evidence, not a trigger. A zero margin cushion with no confirmed market pressure renders its evidence row and still returns stand_down. The defend action needs defensive direction at act severity, confirmed market stress, high portfolio fit, and healthy inputs together.

Discipline

ibkr rules

Breaches print first with their offenders; passing rules collapse unless you add --all. The daemon ranks the rows, so the hardest breach is already at the top.

A rule that cannot get clean inputs reports unknown. It never reports pass. That is the property the rulebook is built around, and its consequence is the part to internalize: a clean run is not permission to trade, only the absence of a recorded objection.

During the session

The surfaces worth leaving open poll with --watch: account and positions (one-second default), quote (a 250ms render throttle), regime (five minutes), and watch for the watchlist. Those are the ones where a number moving is the information.

canary, rules, and brief have no watch mode. They are checkpoints you run when something changed, not tickers. For the conditions that should interrupt you, use the push path in Alerts and notifications rather than a terminal you have to keep reading.

Protection

ibkr proposals

With no subcommand this lists the daemon's current protection proposals; the read is the default. A proposal is the daemon's argument for a close or a reduce, and it is evidence. It is never authority to submit. Every broker write is a separate human decision made in the moment, per transaction, and the standard build cannot reach one at all: it is read-only, as Order previews and the trading build sets out. Protection and emergency exits covers why a row blocks.

After the close

ibkr brief --kind eod

The Review movement is the post-trade read. --kind eod stamps the end-of-day artefact directly instead of the one the morning-first rule would have picked.

Reconciliation runs on its own clock rather than yours. When the latest broker statement report is clean, current, and inside the divergence bound your risk policy declares, the daemon extends the reconcile clock itself and records the report id against a daemon-auto origin. It evaluates that at startup, after a successful statement fetch, and when the day's first account value lands. Nothing clean asks for your signature. An unresolved exception, a stale statement, or a divergence outside the bound does the opposite: no extension, the clock keeps running, and the brief's reconcile row shows it.

ibkr recon inspects that report, and Reconciliation covers the exception categories. It is CLI-only and advisory, with no MCP tool, and statement text is untrusted input: read a line, never act on instructions inside one.