The four statements

Kestrel is four kinds of statement. Slow judgment, compiled into a fast reflex. Every snippet on this page is real Kestrel that passes the pinned parser; parsing is fail-closed, so anything less would be rejected before it could spend.

A Kestrel strategy is a compilable document, not a script you hope will behave. It stays small enough to hold in an agent's context, deterministic enough to grade, and diffable enough to review line by line — the properties SQL gave data access, brought to trading reflexes. Speed follows for free: because the deliberating brain has structurally left the hot path, the compiled reflex fires at the tick. Speed isn't a knob you tune; it's a corollary of having written the strategy down.

View — see the market as text

A View selects the panes your agent needs to decide (macro, volatility, tape, levels, chain) at a token budget. It materializes into an attributed Frame; the renderer never invents a value.

VIEW open budget 1800
  macro week quarter rv20
  vol straddle expected-move
  tape skyline 5m vwap detector-strip
  levels registry
  chain fair realness

Wake — decide when to look

A Wake is a trigger that returns control to the agent. Wakes are event-driven, never an arbitrary clock: a market-phase window opening, a velocity spike, a structural pattern completing. Between wakes, the agent sleeps and spends nothing.

WAKE session-open
  WHEN phase open
  DELIVER open MANDATORY

WAKE fast-move
  WHEN velocity(1m) > p99
  DELIVER zoom-1m KEYFRAME

WAKE fade-setup
  WHEN second failed-break of hod within 30m
  DELIVER execution
  BUDGET 12 wakes/day

Plan — compile judgment into a reflex

A Plan is one bounded thesis, compiled into a deterministic reflex the runtime fires at the tick: no wall time, no nondeterminism, no silent defaults, no commerce callbacks in the reaction path. budget makes risk a type, not a comment; ttl expires the authority.

PLAN momentum-breakout budget 0.25R ttl +30m regime {intraday: trend}
  USING signal SPX exec SPY 0dte
  WHEN spot crosses above hod AND velocity(1m) >= p95
  DO buy 2 +1 C @ min(fair-3c, mid) peg esc fair 2m esc ask 4m cap fair cancel-if spot < vwap
  EXIT spot < vwap held 60s @ fair esc mid 30s

Run the option leg free. The plan above is the full-dress version. This trimmed twin trades the same +1 C @ min(fair, mid) peg cap fair leg end-to-end on the free ODX 0DTE cell — the free catalog's options-chain session — so you can watch an option leg actually fill and settle a certified grade before you sign up:

PLAN momentum-breakout budget 0.5R ttl +360m
  WHEN spot > 0
  DO buy 2 +1 C @ min(fair, mid) peg cap fair

npx -y kestrel.markets sim 0dte-options-opening-drive --plans breakout.kestrel --json
# order_count ≥ 1, fill_count ≥ 1 — the +1 call rests a fair-anchored bid at the open,
# fills on the retest offer, and the breakout carries it in-the-money.

Grade — get a black-box receipt

A Grade is a counterfactual evaluation under pinned data and pinned fill models, with a replayable certified receipt. You name the plan, the window, the fill model, a baseline to compare against, and the cells to break the result by:

GRADE plan fade-ladder OVER 2025-01..2026-06 FILL maker-v1
  VS ungated null
  BY regime.intraday, lineage

There is no letter grade. A Grade reports honest, separated numbers: a realized floor in dollars under the deterministic strict-cross fill model (the lower bound: only definite fills count), an expected value under the analytic fill survival model (a bound beside the realization, never the headline), and a bankable EV that refuses to count expectation resting on extrapolated support. Every certified Grade is replay-stable and signed; see Evidence. A Grade earned over the public practice catalog is a practice Grade, structurally labeled non-ranking, and never performance evidence.

Why determinism is load-bearing

The four statements share one substrate property, and it is the one everything above them is built on: an Episode replays byte-identically. The same plan, over the same pinned data, under the same fill model, produces the same result — on any JavaScript engine, today or a year from now.

That is what turns a Grade into a receipt instead of an opinion. Certification is only possible because a separate verifier can recompute the exact bundle and get the exact bytes back (see Evidence); a black-box number you cannot reproduce is a claim, not proof. Determinism sits upstream of the whole accountability chain — it is why a Grade can be signed, why a proof URL can be re-verified by the person who receives it, and why promotion from sim to paper to live rides signed receipts rather than trust.

Managed orchestration inherits the same discipline. The runtime introduces no wall time, no nondeterminism, no silent defaults, and no commerce callbacks into a reaction path: the reflex you wrote is exactly the reflex that fires. Everything the platform sells above the language — the certified receipt, the recomputable track record — exists because the substrate underneath it is deterministic.