Glossary

Accumulation Buffer. Bounds on the base asset set aside for accumulation, configured as a [min, max] range and resolved live from the Fear & Greed index. Applies on every venue.

Alpha. The excess return generated by an investment relative to a benchmark index. In Dio, alpha refers to the profit earned from capturing market volatility beyond passive holding returns.

Asset Agnostic. A design principle indicating that the strategy operates identically regardless of the underlying traded asset. Dio's strategies are applied uniformly to equities, bonds, ETFs, options, futures, FX, and digital assets.

Capital Oracle. The engine's sizing layer. It merges each asset's all-time price history, derives drawdown references from it, verifies candidate parameters by survival replay, allocates quote pools per venue in priority order, and publishes one decision record per asset.

Cancellation Cascade. The mechanism by which a higher-priority strategy's unaffordable need cancels lower-priority resting buys until capital frees up. Many lesser orders may be cancelled to satisfy one greater; cancelled strategies re-evaluate on the same event.

d_surv. The survival fraction produced by replaying candidate ladder parameters through the funded depth with venue fees on both sides. Values of 1.0 or above mean the depth was fully survived before allocated quote ran out.

Decision Record. The four contract values published per asset per oracle pass: active, grid_interval, buy_qty, sell_qty. Generated by exactly one code path and consumed everywhere; raw floats, normalized only at the exchange layer.

Domain (OCaml 5). An isolated parallel execution unit in OCaml 5. Each trading asset in Dio runs in its own domain, providing true parallelism without shared mutable state.

Fear & Greed Index. A market sentiment indicator (0-100) used to resolve the accumulation buffer. For digital assets, Dio uses the CoinMarketCap index; for equities, the CNN index. Low values indicate fear, high values indicate greed.

Grid Interval. The percentage spacing between ladder rungs, configured as hardened [min, max] bounds on the strategy entry and resolved within those bounds by the oracle's parameter search. The strategy never reads the configuration value directly.

Grid Trading. A trading strategy that places buy and sell orders at predetermined price intervals, allowing for profit capture from incremental price movements without directional prediction.

HODL. A long-term investment strategy where assets are retained despite short-term market volatility. Dio's accumulation mechanisms embody the HODL philosophy by systematically growing base asset positions through trading profits.

Jacobs Ladder. Dio's primary executor strategy. It maintains one trailing buy below the price, sells each filled buy once at the fill price raised by one interval, never cancels placed sells, and runs its sell leg even while inactive because sells need inventory, not quote.

Lock-Free Communication. A concurrency pattern using atomic compare-and-set operations instead of mutexes, enabling zero-contention reads across OCaml 5 domains.

Market Maker (MM). A strategy that provides two-sided liquidity at profitable spread levels on stable or pegged assets, dynamically adapting pricing based on exchange fee structure. Its activity verdict comes from the oracle's decision record.

Mean Reversion. A financial principle stating that asset prices tend to return to their historical average after extreme movements. Ladder trading leverages mean reversion to capture volatility-driven gains.

Parameter Search. The oracle's resolution of spacing and size within hardened bounds. Three branches in order: Unreachable falls back to the conservative corner, Reachable takes the largest size at the tightest spacing meeting the survival target biased by aggressiveness, and Surplus takes maximum size at minimum spacing.

Post-Only Order. A limit order that is rejected if it would immediately execute against the opposing book. All Dio strategy orders are post-only where the venue supports the flag, ensuring the engine acts as a maker, not a taker.

Reserved Base. Base asset set aside by the persistence layer from profitable sell fills, excluded from future sell sizing. A cost-averaging mechanism funded entirely by spread profits that survives engine restarts.

Runway. The drawdown budget the ladder must fund, derived from the asset's history: the realized decline from all-time high, the maximum historical peak-to-trough decline, and a floor price below which the funding target extends to the all-time low.

Sharpe Ratio. A measure of risk-adjusted return that evaluates investment performance relative to its volatility. Grid trading backtests report Sharpe ratios of ~1.45, compared to ~0.97 for trend-following strategies.

Suicide Grid. The risk posture of Jacobs Ladder: traditional order-level controls (stop-losses, hedging, exits) deliberately removed and replaced with structural survivability constraints computed by the oracle. The ladder accepts unrestricted downside exposure per order while aggregate risk is constrained by capital sizing, accumulation gating, and spacing that widens as mean-reversion assumptions weaken.

Volatility. The extent of an asset's price fluctuations over time. Dio treats volatility as a source of systematic returns rather than a risk to be avoided.