reference

the terms the writing leans on — market structure, information theory, agent architecture. short definitions; the dedicated explainers go deeper as they land. you don't need these to read the posts. they're here if you want them.

market structure & flow

vwap: volume-weighted average price — the day's average price weighted by where the volume actually traded. institutions benchmark their fills against it; price reclaiming vwap and holding above it on rising volume says buyers have taken control of the session.
fibonacci levels (fib): price levels drawn from the ratios in the fibonacci sequence (.382, .5, .618). they matter not because the math is magic but because enough participants act on them that they become self-fulfilling structure — a memory of where price reversed before. ghost runs them across multiple timeframes.
dealer gamma: options dealers who sell you a contract hedge it by trading the underlying stock. as price nears a strike, that hedging forces them to buy (or sell) the stock mechanically — so the options market creates real, directional pressure in the stock itself. on the way up it amplifies the bid; on the way down it accelerates selling. → anatomy (II)
sweep classification: a sweep is an aggressive order that takes liquidity across multiple venues at once. classifying it — organic urgency vs a forced/trapped flow vs a bull trap — tells you whether the aggression is real conviction or someone being squeezed. → anatomy (I)
rsi / oversold stress score: rsi measures how stretched price is after a run (0–100; low reads oversold). ghost's stress score combines how deep, how fast, and how long the oversold condition has run — good for spotting that an extreme exists, blind to whether the extreme is still building or already exhausting.
moving average (ma): the average price over a trailing window (say 50 days). it smooths noise into a trend line; where price sits relative to it, and which way it slopes, is a read on direction and strength.
macd: moving average convergence divergence — the gap between a fast and a slow moving average, plotted as a histogram. when the histogram flips from contracting-bearish to expanding-bullish, momentum is turning.
structural floor / accumulation / markup: a structural floor is a price level big buyers defend. accumulation is them buying it quietly without showing their hand; markup is the phase after, when they push price up off the inventory they built. → anatomy (I)
dark pool / iceberg orders: two ways to buy size without showing it. dark pools route trades off the public tape; iceberg orders reveal only a sliver of the true order at a time. both let an institution absorb shares without tipping the market to what it's doing.
the options layer (puts / calls / strikes): puts and calls are contracts to sell or buy at a set price (the strike). selling puts at a floor means agreeing to buy there and getting paid to wait; the dealer on the other side then has to hedge — which (see dealer gamma) moves the stock.

information theory & statistics

surprisal (nats): from information theory: how surprising an event is, measured in nats. a move the market had priced as unlikely carries more information than a big move everyone expected. ghost reads prediction-market repricing this way — small move, low prior, high surprisal.
bayesian feedback (prior / posterior): start with a belief — the prior, e.g. how often this setup held historically. observe what actually happens. update to a revised belief, the posterior. ghost learns this way, isolated per market regime so a lesson from one environment doesn't pollute another.
james-stein shrinkage: a statistical correction that pulls noisy small-sample estimates toward the group average — so a setup seen only a handful of times doesn't get trusted as if it had a long track record.
hurst exponent: a single number for the character of a series: above .5 it trends (persistence), below .5 it mean-reverts, around .5 it's a random walk. it's how ghost reads whether the current regime has follow-through or chops.
vix: the market's expected volatility over the next month, implied from options prices — the "fear gauge." when it sells off, fear is draining out of the tape.
williams %r: a momentum oscillator measuring where price closed relative to its recent range. part of how ghost reads position within a move.
the environment quartet: the four readings ghost takes for the macro state: position (williams %r), sentiment (vix), information velocity (surprisal), and persistence (hurst). together, a behavioral snapshot of the tape.
regime: the prevailing market environment — trending up, mean-reverting, high-fear, and so on. ghost isolates its learning per regime because what works in one fails in another.

agent architecture

ontology / epistemology / hermeneutics: the formal docs that give ghost its shape — what its concepts are, how it knows what it knows, how it interprets. not documentation; the substrate. → formalizing (I)
confluence: when multiple independent signals agree on the same read. ghost weights confluence over any single signal — agreement across methods beats one method's conviction.
cache-as-trigger: ghost wakes up to work when its cache invalidates: a changed input is the signal that something needs re-analysis. the cache isn't storage, it's the trigger.
the 85/15 split: roughly 85% of ghost is deterministic signal code; ~15% is llm interpretation. system 1 / system 2 — the machinery computes, the agent judges.
hydration / now-state: how a fresh agent becomes ghost by reading the substrate, rather than starting as a generic model with file access. the continuity isn't the model; it's what was built to survive its absence. → hydration