# Strategist View (/docs/views/strategist)





The **Strategist** runs a Book: the leaf where positions actually live. It is the frontier-class
judgment of the pod — slow, deliberate, a few calls a day at dollars a call. Its job is to
*frame*: orient at the open, commit a thesis, and author armed plans that carry their own
defined-risk exits so the book is never naked. When a regime breaks or a Watcher escalates, the
Strategist re-frames.

## The seat [#the-seat]

**Task.** Orient at the open; commit a thesis; author armed plans with their own exits; re-frame
on a shock or a Watcher escalation. The Strategist authors — it is the seat that writes the
plans the rest of the Book runs on.

**Timescale.** A few times a day, at dollars a call. The Strategist can afford to read a wide,
dense screen and think hard about it, because it acts rarely and decisively. This is the
opposite end of the latency envelope from the Watcher, which is why the two read different
screens.

**When it fires.** At the **open**, to frame the session. The Strategist's View is the open View;
on a mid-session wake, framing gives way to the Watcher's management loop, and the Strategist is
consulted again only on a re-frame.

## The View [#the-view]

```kestrel
VIEW strategist-open
  instruments
  levels
  tape
  chain
  acting
```

The order tracks the framing task. `instruments` first names what is tradable and how it
prices — the multipliers and ticks the thesis will be denominated in. `levels` fixes the day's
geometry: spot against prior close, the high and low, VWAP, the opening range. `tape` shows how
price is moving through that geometry. `chain` prices the options the plans will actually use,
with each fair floored at intrinsic and a `bid dark` mark called out rather than guessed.
`acting` closes with the kernel's ground truth — positions, resting orders, fills, budget, and
the plans already armed — so the frame the Strategist authors from is the real state of the
book, not a remembered one.

This is exactly the shipped open default (`DEFAULT_OPEN_PANES`), which is why the screen below is
the open briefing byte-for-byte. When `seatViews: "founder"` is set, the Strategist at the open
resolves to this View; with no seat, the same panes render as the phase default.

## The screen [#the-screen]

<PerceptScreen title="strategist-open · OPEN briefing" caption="kestrel-renderer/8 · byte-real" text="strategistOpen" />

## Open vs wake [#open-vs-wake]

The Strategist's screen is an **open** screen: a full orientation from a flat or lightly-held
book, dense enough to author a whole session's thesis in one read. It leads with the
non-configurable safety kernel — data health, positions, budget, owner envelope — because a frame
authored over stale or missing data must fail closed, never fill a guess. It is not a wake
screen: it does not lead with what changed since the last look, because at the open there is no
"last look" to diff against. That delta-led reading is the Watcher's job; see the
[Watcher View](/docs/views/watcher).

The panes here are the **equity-index options** variant of the framer's screen — the chain, the
intrinsic-floored fair, the expiry-relative session ordinals. The same seat frames other markets
through the same View grammar as those variants ship; see
[the variant axis](/docs/views#the-variant-axis).