Glossary

Terms the rest of the handbook assumes you know. Each entry gives the meaning this system uses and links to the page where the term does real work; where the wider industry uses a word differently, the entry says so.

• Advisory: guidance that records and explains without blocking or submitting an order. The personal risk policy, the Rulebook's 14 discipline checks, and protection proposals are all advisory today. See Trading policy.
• Agent origin: the classification an adapter stamps on a broker-write request. Any agent marker in the environment, or a non-TTY stdin, classifies the process as agent, and no environment variable can claim a human origin. Origin is recorded for audit and origin-specific policy; it grants no authority by itself. See IBKR_AGENT_CONTEXT in the configuration reference.
• Borrow stress: the two short-borrow flags on a stock. borrow_inventory_tight fires at 10,000 shortable shares or fewer and reads scarce at 1,000 or fewer; borrow_fee_extreme fires at an annualized fee of 50% or more. Both are reduce-only context for an existing short, never a reason to open or add exposure. See Concepts.
• Breadth: the share of S&P 500 constituents trading above their 50- and 200-day moving averages, plus 52-week new highs and new lows. The daemon computes all three locally from constituent closes, because IBKR does not redistribute S&P DJI's official breadth indices on retail subscriptions. See Concepts.
• Broker execution evidence: the broker's confirmations and statements, describing what was actually executed. It is a separate source from the local decision record. See Trading policy.
• Buying power: the gateway's figure for how much you could buy. It is never the risk budget here; sizing and the drawdown ladder key off declared risk capital instead. See Trading policy.
• Capital event: an operator-declared deposit, withdrawal, or reconcile fact journaled against the risk policy. Adjusted equity subtracts cumulative declared flows, so a deposit does not create a fake peak and a withdrawal does not create a fake drawdown. See Trading policy.
• Content fingerprint: an ID derived from normalized policy fields. It deliberately ignores comments and formatting, and it must accompany retained content when historical reconstruction matters. See Trading policy.
• Current state: the latest accepted version of a fact, used by the running product. See Storage.
• Daemon: the long-running ibkr daemon process. It owns the broker connections, daemon.db, the schedulers, and policy execution; CLI, MCP, app, and web surfaces are adapters that read typed results from it. See Architecture.
• Drawdown ladder: two tiers in the personal risk policy, warn and block, each a percent of declared risk capital consumed from the cash-flow-adjusted equity peak. Warn is advisory and self-clearing; block latches until a journaled human reset. Schema version 1 rejects hard enforcement outright. See Trading policy.
• Effective risk capital: the lesser of declared risk capital and equity above the protected floor. Deposits and profits never raise it; only a policy revision does. See Trading policy.
• Event: an immutable local record of something the software observed, decided, or attempted. Events are append-only and are never rewritten to fit a new shape. See Storage.
• Finality: whether a value's source can still revise it. A figure can be current and not final, which is why restated broker statements get their own immutable versions. See Trading policy.
• Fixed-fractional sizing: risking a fixed percent of NLV on each trade. ibkr size computes shares as NLV × risk-pct ÷ 100 × fx ÷ |entry − stop|, rounded down to the lot, and returns zero shares with status tight_risk when the budget will not cover one lot. See the CLI reference.
• Freeze: trading.freeze, the runtime brake. Setting it true blocks every new broker write while cancels stay allowed. It is human-only: ibkr settings set from an interactive terminal, with missing, agent, and paired-device origins rejected. See the configuration reference.
• Freshness: whether evidence is recent enough for the decision at hand. Sensors report it as an explicit state instead of leaving you to compare timestamps, and a failed refresh never restamps an old value. See Sensors.
• Greeks: delta, gamma, theta, and vega, the standard option sensitivities. ibkr reports them per option leg when the daemon captured a valid model-computation tick, and discloses partial coverage as greeks_coverage over greeks_total. A Greek the gateway did not deliver is null, never zero-substituted. See Working with agents.
• Implied move: the 1-sigma expected dollar move by expiration, spot × IV × √(DTE/365). Standard desk math, computed per expiry on the chain surface. See the CLI reference.
• Journal: the append-only local record of what ibkr attempted. Order journal rows bind each lifecycle event to the exact broker route, and policy, capital, and governance actions journal their own events. See Storage.
• Last-good: the most recent complete result a sensor published. A failed refresh leaves last-good visible with explicit health rather than blanking it, changing its timestamp, or turning absence into zero. See Sensors.
• Local decision record: what ibkr observed, evaluated, or attempted. It explains context; it is not evidence of what the broker executed. See Trading policy.
• LULD: limit up-limit down, the US volatility pause on a single name. An active luld_pause blocks protection preview and submit; a recent one is a warning tag that needs fresh quote context before acting. See Concepts.
• Managed account: the account list the gateway advertises after handshake. With [gateway].account empty the daemon auto-detects from that list, which is fine for a single-account login and needs an explicit pin when the login carries several. See Order previews and the trading build.
• NLV: net liquidation value, the account's liquidating value in base currency as the gateway reports it. Exposure percentages, position sizing, and the risk policy's equity reading all key off it. See Working with agents.
• Observation: a retained measurement from a named source, kept separately from any conclusion drawn from it. Imported historical observations are stamped decision_eligible=false, so research data can never seed a current verdict. See Storage.
• Open interest: the number of option contracts outstanding at a strike. Missing OI is unknown, never zero: a priced leg without observed OI can support the IV and skew fit but contributes no open-interest-weighted exposure. See Sensors.
• Paper and live: how the daemon classifies the connected session. Port 4002 or 7497, or an account starting DU, reads as paper; 4001 or 7496, or a non-DU account, reads as live; anything else is unknown. The pinned account must match what the connected session advertises, and that check runs in paper mode too. See Order previews and the trading build.
• Preview token: a daemon-signed artifact minted by an order preview. Placing, modifying, and cancelling an order each require a submit-eligible token; minting one is not eligibility, and the preview itself submits nothing to the broker. See Order previews and the trading build.
• R-multiple: the reward-to-risk ratio, |target − entry| ÷ |entry − stop|. ibkr size returns it alongside the breakeven win rate, 1 ÷ (1 + R). See the CLI reference.
• Reg SHO: the SEC short-sale rule whose threshold-securities list ibkr reads. Coverage is Nasdaq's file only, so a symbol's absence is not proof it is off every listing exchange's list. See Concepts.
• Regime stage: the broad-market lifecycle label on the regime dashboard: quiet, early_warning, confirmed_stress, panic, stabilization, opportunity, or data_quality. That last stage is not a mild stress reading; it means required evidence is missing, broken, contradictory, or overdue. See Concepts.
• Semantic fingerprint: a stable sha256 over classified state, not over prices, timestamps, or rendered prose. Monitors use it to suppress duplicate alerts when nothing meaningful has changed. See Sensors.
• Sensor: a daemon-owned measurement carrying an as_of time, source health, freshness, and a semantic fingerprint. Sensors do not decide trading policy, authorize an order, or prove that an alert reached a device. See Sensors.
• Shadow: evaluation and recording without enforcing the result. See Trading policy.
• Source of record: the location the software is allowed to treat as current for one kind of fact. Human-authored policy files, retained broker statements, and daemon.db each hold their own. See Storage.
• Storage layer: the code and operating rules that preserve state, evidence, and recovery continuity. SQLite supplies the engine; the surrounding code defines what may be stored and who may write it. See Storage.
• Submit authority: an explicit human decision for one transaction. A policy result, proposal, alert, preview, or token is evidence, never that authority. See Trading policy.
• Theta hygiene: the protection-proposal bucket that flags near-dated options to close or reduce. Extrinsic value as a share of mark is its materiality gate, so an intrinsic-dominated option is suppressed: theta erodes only extrinsic value. See the configuration reference.
• Transaction: on the storage pages, a group of database changes that all commit or all fail together. The trading pages use the word in its ordinary market sense instead, as in submit authority for one transaction. See Storage.
• Unapproved: a material human choice has not been made. It is not zero, safe, or a default. See Trading policy.
• Zero gamma: the spot price at which the aggregate options-dealer book switches from amplifying moves to damping them. It is a regime hint rather than a precise level, and SPX is the canonical book with SPY as corroboration. See Concepts.