What shipped and when

• Trade Signals: the Auto Desk as a board of long and short calls

  Every level the Auto Desk's tested ES rules trade today, one row each: long or short, the entry, the stop, the target, what the target pays against what the stop costs, and where the signal stands right now on the live tape (waiting and why, ready with the distance to the entry, live with its open points, or done). Below it, today's closed signals and the last 30 days on your terminal. It runs whether or not you arm the desk, and it never touches your paper account. ES only for now: it is the one market with a rule that passed my testing, so NQ says exactly that instead of showing a guess. Simulated, not advice.

• Breadth & Sentiment meters

  Six readings on one panel: a live MAG-7 TICK (upticks minus downticks on the seven megacaps, from every print), the Arms index and advancers minus decliners over about 455 US large caps, SPX put/call volume against its own year, VIX on the day, and the ES gamma regime. Each meter names its universe; none of them pretends to be the NYSE's own TICK or TRIN, which no feed I pay for carries. The footer counts how many readings lean risk-on and risk-off rather than inventing one score.

• Both are on the opening desk

  They sit in the left column under the chart. The central-bank and regulatory stream is now a tab behind Trade Signals, one click away. Preferences ▸ General still lets you open on your own last layout instead.

• About a third smaller

  The installer drops from 314 MB to about 215 MB on Windows and from 264 MB to about 170 MB on macOS, and the voice packs for the other nine languages shrink the same way. Pharos's voice lines were stored at music quality; they are now stored the way spoken audio usually is, and the timing of every stitched sentence is unchanged. The built-in C++ compiler for your own studies lost the parts a study compile never uses. Nothing else changes: same features, same voice, same Study Editor.

• Cluster bubbles stay readable on the liquidity heatmap

  On a dense heatmap the biggest bubbles could disappear under the heat. With the heatmap on, a bubble now gets a clean ring, a solid fill and a full-strength label, and it is always taller than a heat cell. With the heatmap off it looks exactly as before.

• Pharos reads the tape on NQ and ES

  With the Squawk on, she now calls the orders that matter as they print: "Fifty-one lot buyer swept ten ticks, up to the nineteen." / "Eighty lot seller hit the bid at the twenty-four point two five." / "It is holding." Blocks, sweeps and size that trades at one price without getting through, measured on a week of recorded NQ and ES tape: about one call every 3-4 minutes in the cash session and a few an hour overnight. It says what traded, never what to do. Tools > Order-Flow Call-outs turns it off. Other markets stay quiet until they have their own thresholds. The new lines are English for now; on a desk in another language they are skipped rather than read in English.

• "Buyers are taking over" is off by default

  On a fast market it was reading less than a second of tape and called a change of control far too often. It now measures two minutes of volume and needs a side to lead for a full minute; turn it back on under Tools > Flow Regime Call-outs.

• The Auto Desk describes the book it actually runs

  The panel used to open on a fixed paragraph about the September ES defaults, whatever book was loaded. It now describes the live rules: each session and its window, each leg's level, offset, target and stop, the size, the daily stop and the cost. A rules file can now set a round-trip cost in points, taken off every close, so the record's points and dollars are net and the export says what was charged. The trade note writes the real distance the entry rested from its level instead of always "one point", and no longer says "regime unknown" when the session took no regime. The open trade and the panel log show Eastern time, the clock the sessions are written in, not your computer's.

• MetaTrader bridge

  Sharpnel listens again by itself after a restart or update, and the bridge EA (1.10) waits and reconnects instead of unloading when Sharpnel is not running yet. If you set the bridge up before this version, open Broker Connections > MetaTrader once, Generate, Save, and paste the new token into the EA.

• Right-click a bar: what happened the last times it looked like this

  On an ES, NQ, RTY or YM chart (or a micro), right-click a bar > What Happened Last Time?. It searches the tape I've recorded since April for the moments most like the 30 minutes into that bar - same time of day, earlier sessions only - and shows what followed: how often it was up 15 and 60 minutes later and how spread out the moves were, the best and worst close in the next hour, and the next hour's median path. Every number sits next to the same number for all days at that minute, so you can see whether the matches say anything the base rate doesn't. Click a match to replay it in Game Film. It says what followed; it doesn't forecast. Pro.

• Journal: every fill graded against the recorded book

  A new FILLS board reads the book the desk records every second around each of your live fills: the mid when you traded, what you paid against it in ticks and dollars, and where the mid was 1, 5, 30 and 60 seconds later. It adds up to what you paid this period, hour by hour, with the costliest fills listed. For a limit you placed in the terminal it also reads the book in the second you placed it and shows how many contracts were resting at your price ahead of you - worth knowing, because a paper fill at a touch assumes you were first in line. A micro is graded against its full-size book and says so. A fill with no recorded book in the 3 seconds before it is left ungraded, never scored as zero, and sim, replay and the Pharos desk aren't graded at all.

• Journal: your bracket, held to plan - and the trade again, in the Sim Gym

  The PLAN board replays each trade you opened with a bracket on the recorded one-minute tape: what holding to your own stop and target would have made against what you made, trade by trade and in total. The target counts only when price trades a tick through it, a gap through the stop fills at the open, and a minute that reached both is marked ambiguous rather than guessed. Then practise it: right-click a closed trade > RE-TRADE opens it in the Sim Gym from 2 minutes before your entry to 10 after your exit, your real fills appearing as ghosts as the clock reaches them, and the scorecard puts your original trade above every attempt.

• Eval Gym: rehearse a funded evaluation on real recorded sessions

  Journal > Eval Gym: pick ES, MES, NQ or MNQ, an account (50K, 100K or 150K presets shaped like common evaluations, every rule editable because firms differ) and how many sessions. It trades them one after another in the Sim Gym on the recorded tape with the rules enforced: the profit target counts once you have traded the minimum days, touching the trailing drawdown fails the run, the daily loss limit ends the day, and no order can take you past the contract cap. Each day ends flat, then NEXT SESSION; no rewinds and no peeking ahead. The report at the end - rules, every day, every breach - saves as a picture. Money is gross: practice fills carry no commissions, and the report says so.

• Wind Tunnel: what your study would have told you, on months of recorded tape

  Custom Studies > Wind Tunnel, or the Wind Tunnel button in the Study Editor right after a compile. Pick one of your chart's studies - built-in or one you compiled - the line, and the moment it fires: crossing a value or another of its lines, price closing through it, or switching on. It runs over up to 26 weeks of the chart's own symbol and timeframe, on your machine, and shows what followed 5, 15 and 60 bars later next to what followed every bar of the same sample, where in the day it fired, and every firing to replay. It only calls a study better or worse than that when the difference in points is outside the noise, and it re-runs sampled firings on just the bars up to them, so a study that repaints is told it does. Pro.

• Game Film: CLIP it and post it

  Press C in the film room (or the CLIP button) and it films the room from the clock forward - 15 seconds to 2 minutes of video at 1x to 8x - to an MP4 in your Movies folder, watermarked. Every frame is the room exactly at its moment on the tape, and the voice notes you recorded while trading (hold F8) land on the soundtrack where you said them. It uses your computer's own video encoder, so nothing extra downloads.

• Gamma: the Hedge Tape, and the projection view finally draws

  A new Pro panel, Add Panel > Options > Hedge Tape, turns every ES and NQ print into what the options book behind our gamma levels would have to trade to stay hedged through that move - one row a minute with a running total - plus what one more point costs that book right now and the price where its hedging flips from leaning against moves to leaning with them. It is a model and every line of it says so; it is not order flow. And the Gamma profile's PROJ view, gamma across price and the rest of the day, was never receiving its data. It is now.

• One sheet instead of a wall of tiles

  Filings Radar opens one table now instead of seven filing tapes side by side: every tape, newest filing first, the tape as a column, and 1 / 2 / 3 switching between all, catalysts and distress. M&A & Catalysts does the same with its five tapes. Euro Compare keeps its overlay chart and swaps the four single-country tiles for the member-state table, which adds producer prices, inflation and unemployment. A feed that drops keeps its last rows and the header counts it down.

• The DOM's footprint band in Renko bricks

  Right-click the ladder > Footprint bars > Renko 1, 2 or 4 points. The bricks are the chart's own - the same fold of the same tape as a Renko chart - each with its bid and ask volume per price, continued live between refreshes and remembered per symbol.

• Chart V3 is the only chart

  Chart Classic is gone. A saved layout that still had it opens Chart V3 in the same place, and Classic's horizontal and labelled levels move into V3's levels once, unarmed and never doubled. Its trendlines and other drawings were tied to Classic's bars and can't be moved faithfully, so they aren't guessed at. The Climax RSI study made the move, V3 gains Clear All Drawings, Ctrl+Shift+F opens the Footprint panel and Ctrl+Shift+B flips V3 to 1-point Renko and back.

• Ten languages, all the way to the ladder

  A new install opens in your computer's language when it is one of the ten - the license screen and the welcome included - instead of English until you find the language picker. Japanese no longer draws as empty boxes on the DOM, chart, TPO and footprint, and Arabic now joins its letters and reads right to left everywhere - on the painted panels and in every button, tab and table. The DOM's session box, the Journal, the footprint, TPO, Market Board and Alerts read in your language now, and so does most of the rest: every panel's name on its tab and in its header, around two hundred panel bodies - the macro and credit boards, the world map, the risk and options panels, every study legend - and every dialog, from the bug report to Go to Symbol, plus the status badges in panel headers, the LOADING / STALE / DELAYED pill on the DOM, TPO, footprint and Gamma panels, and the Gamma profile's stat boxes and hover readout. Dates and day names follow the language too, with the digits kept plain like every price. The ladder's buttons make room for longer words instead of cutting them off, and the Journal's filter bar wraps instead of making the panel at least 1,668 pixels wide (2,162 in German). In every language but English the session box used to call your open P&L the opening price; it doesn't anymore.

• The Mac app is half the size

  The program inside the Mac app went from 77 MB to 39 MB. It had been carrying the engine of the web terminal I retired in June - a whole graphics toolkit it never started - because the Mac build never stripped code nothing calls, which the Windows build always did. It's gone from both now, nothing you use changed, and updates have less to download.

• The Study Editor compiles again on Windows

  Since 1.10.228 the Windows installer shipped without the C++ compiler the Study Editor uses, so Compile answered that the compiler wasn't found. It is back in the installer, which grows by about 70 MB, and a build without it now refuses to ship.

• Smaller fixes

  Vol Surface (and its 3D view) and the Pin Risk Calendar have data again for SPY, QQQ, IWM, DIA, NVDA, AAPL, AMZN and TSLA: since early September the server fetching their option chains had been failing every time, so those panels sat empty. That one was on the server and is already fixed for everyone. The command palette keeps up from the first keystroke: every row was reading your hotkey settings again on every keystroke, so the first letters after opening it, which match the most rows, took several times longer than the rest. Study alerts read the latest bar. They used to reach back to the study's last defined value, which on a line with gaps - Volume's up-volume on a down bar, Supertrend's up leg in a downtrend, delta on a bar with no split - meant an old number stood in for the current one; now a rule simply can't fire where the line is undefined. Clear All Drawings comes back with a single Ctrl+Z. The Auto Desk's status line shows the day's gamma regime in every session; in London it used to read “? gamma”. The Gamma profile's positioning-history rows no longer cut off their labels. On the Mac, the label-and-value rows - the journal's trade card, Fundamentals, Contract Specs and others - cut their numbers short with an ellipsis even with room to spare (+$1017.… for +$1017.80); they draw whole now. A network hiccup the app shrugged off no longer comes back on the next launch as "Sharpnel Desktop closed unexpectedly" - only a real crash asks.

• Chart trading: drag your orders, and buy or sell from the chart's menu

  A working order's line on the chart now drags to a new price like the ladder's pills do - same order, bracket kept, snapped to the tick - and a plain click on it still cancels. Right-click on the chart offers the two orders that make sense at that price (below the market a buy limit or a sell stop, above it a sell limit or a buy stop), placed through an ARMED ladder on the same symbol with that ladder's size and TP/SL, behind every gate the ladder has. No armed ladder, no order. On the DOM, a right-click on the far side of the market places a stop.

• Cockpit vitals: your own pace and size, stated while you are still in it

  The terminal keeps a baseline of how you actually trade, from your own journal: the minutes between your entries, the size you take right after a loss, and how often you move a working order. When a session leaves it, the status bar says so in plain numbers - "4 entries in 7 min · your median gap 26 min" - and what it said at the entry stays on the trade in your journal. It names no emotion and blocks nothing. It stays quiet until it has 5 sessions and 30 trades of yours to go on, and you can switch it off under Preferences > Risk.

• Say why you took the trade and it lands in your journal

  "Hey Pharos, add this trade to my journal: entry at 5012, the put wall held twice." The terminal shows exactly the words it heard, which trade they will land on, and lets you fix a word, re-record or save. The words are yours - no model rewrites them - and an existing note is kept, the new words go under it. It uses the terminal's own speech recognition, so nothing leaves your machine, and it works from the chat box too. Asked for by a customer in July.

• Gamma: levels that agree say so, and each expiry gets its own read

  A call wall, put wall or the flip now checks itself against the visible volume profile's nearest node (POC, VAH or VAL) and the biggest size resting in the book, and writes "2 agree" or "3 agree" after its price when they line up. Right-click > Alert at a Gamma Level arms an alert at the level itself, with the agreeing ones marked. And a new Pro panel, Add Panel > Options > Gamma by Expiry, reads each expiry on its own - its call wall, put wall, flip and share of the chain's gamma - so you can tell a 0DTE wall from the monthly's. Option data is 15 minutes delayed and the panel says so.

• 22 panels that never showed data now do, and most panels put their answer on the title row

  Twenty-two study panels - pattern recognition, market regime, the anomaly detector, Hurst, CVD, anchored VWAP and more - were looking up their bars under a key nothing ever wrote, so they sat in an empty state from the day they shipped. They read the same bars as the chart now. And 31 of 38 panels now put their headline numbers on the title row instead of spending a block of screen height repeating them.

• Pharos: the call-out log, the night session, and the calendar

  Add Panel > Workflow > Pharos Call-outs lists every line she calls - level crosses, big prints, econ countdowns, session marks, the desk - with the time and the price, newest first; click one and the charts jump to that moment. On a futures desk she now calls the Globex reopen, the opening range, Asia, London and the US pre-market. And you can ask her what is on the calendar today: she answers from the same list her countdowns read, and says so when nothing high-impact is scheduled.

• A smaller download, and charts that stop re-fetching their whole history

  The installer carries English only again - about 800 MB lighter on Windows and on the Mac. Her other nine languages download the first time you switch to one, checked before they are used. Each chart used to re-download its full history every two seconds whatever the timeframe; it now fetches when a bar completes and while the symbol trades, so a six-chart workspace moves a fraction of the data. The heatmap now fills the chart's loaded history, up to seven days, instead of a fixed 24 hours.

• Smaller fixes

  Crypto perps: time and sales and the tape show real coin sizes (0.5 BTC reads 0.5) - the feed used to carry them a million times too big. The workspace templates open Chart V3. The Pharos desk refuses an opening range it only saw part of, instead of trading a box it half watched. And the upgrade card shows the price the checkout will charge from 1 November.

• DOM: the bin marks a reset instead of throwing the session away

  Clicking the bin used to clear the per-price delta, volume and profile columns, and the only way back to the session was to reopen the ladder. Now it starts a fresh read from that moment and the chip says SINCE and the time; click it again and the whole session is back, nothing lost. Right-click > Delta profile can reset only the prices above or below the last trade. Asked for on Discord; thank you, Fumble.

• Windows: every update left its installer in your Temp folder

  Each in-app update downloaded the installer to Temp and nothing ever deleted it, about 1 GB a release since August. On my own machine that was 70 files and 22 GB. The app now removes its own old installers and splash markers at start and before each download, exact file names only, nothing else in that folder.

• macOS: the in-app update actually installs

  On a Mac the updater handed the disk image to the system as if it were a program, so an update ended with an error and nothing changed. It now mounts the image, checks the app inside the way Gatekeeper does, swaps it in and restarts. If the app folder is not writable for your account, it opens the image in Finder so you can drag the new version over. The fix lives in the new version, so a Mac on 1.10.237 cannot install this one by itself: download 1.10.238 once from the download page, and updates after it install on their own.

• Windows: the Pharos desk trades the Asia session and two more cash legs

  Windows gets everything 1.10.237 brought to the Mac: the Globex-open fade from 18:30 ET, the opening-half-hour and yesterday's-range legs, the flip leg on negative-gamma days, and a day that rolls at 18:00 ET like the exchange's. A stopped trade now records the stop it was working and how far past it filled, and the desk will never write an empty record over a ledger it could not read.

• Knowing when a launch fails

  A launch that died before the sign-in screen used to tell me nothing, which is how a Mac launch fault stayed invisible until someone wrote in. Each launch now sends one anonymous ping: the app version, the OS, the processor and how far the previous launch got. No account, no name, only a random id made on your machine. On a Mac, the system's own crash report for this app is offered with the same consent prompt Windows crash reports use.

1.10.235New

• The DOM footprint comes in 1, 3 and 5 minute bars

  Right-click the DOM, Footprint bars, pick 1, 3 or 5 minutes; the choice is remembered per symbol, like Group rows. The band still records every print by the minute. The coarser bars are built from those minutes when the panel paints, on the clock, so a 5-minute bar starts at :00, :05, :10, and the busiest level is worked out for the whole bar, not carried over from one of its minutes. The band keeps 45 minutes now instead of 16 and loads that much history when it opens, so a 5-minute view has six full bars from the start. The header says which timeframe you are on. A customer who trades the footprint asked.

• Big resting orders stand out on the dark ladder

  1.10.234 said dark mode shows size like light mode does. It did not, and this time I measured instead of eyeballing. On white a full-size bid or offer sits about 60 lightness units off its lane and a small one about 22. On black the same orders sat 47 and 24 off on the bid side and 36 and 15 on the ask side, so the biggest orders in the book were half as far from the crowd as they are on white. The dark ramp now walks the same curve as the light one, within a unit at every step: the biggest bids are a light azure, the biggest offers a coral red, and the small ones recede. The size digits on those brightest cells turn dark so they stay readable. Light mode is untouched.

• Grouped ladders put the footprint on the row the book shows

  On a 2, 4 or 8-tick ladder a print exactly between two rows went to the lower row in the book and the upper cell in the footprint. On a 2-tick ES ladder that is every odd tick, so half the cells sat one row above the size next to them. The footprint cell now lands on the row the same price sits in beside it. Native ladders never had the problem.

• The Auto Desk trades the gamma flip on negative-gamma days

  The desk took nothing in the New York session on a negative-gamma day, and the tape says that is not rare: a wall is only faded inside the overnight range, and the overnight range is a positive-gamma leg, so a negative-gamma day switched both cash legs off at once. The flip is the level in play on exactly those days. Faded on negative-gamma days only, on the same 47-session tape it is 14 trades at 93% for 2.19 points a trade, and it only adds trades on days that had none, so the worst day and the drawdown do not move. Faded on positive-gamma days it loses, which is why the gate is the whole rule and the selftest asserts it both ways.

• The desk takes more points, and the overnight stop is sized to the night

  Two days live at minus nine points on a 67% win rate was the shape of the rule, not bad luck: taking three or four points while risking twelve means one break undoes three holds. I swept target and stop for every leg on the same tape the rules came from. The walls and the flip now target six points, the overnight range five, the close six and eight. Asia keeps three, because its record is the product. The overnight leg's stop is 30% of that night's Globex range, between 4 and 40 points, instead of a flat twelve: a wide night is a wide day. The walls keep the flat twelve, because a break through a wall is a fill, not a wobble. On the tape that is 220 trades at 90%, 2.25 points a trade, and a smaller drawdown than the old rules. It runs on paper, in the open, and the record at sharpnel-trading.com/desk shows the change from today. The page also refreshes when a level's reason changes, so it no longer says a level is waiting for 09:40 hours after 09:40.

• The watchlist stops flip-flopping Open and Change

  Two feeds wrote the same row, the quote snapshot and the engine's own daily bars, and a symbol's Open and Change flickered between their two answers. Once the engine's bars have written a row they own it.

• Windows first; the Mac build follows

  This release is Windows only for now. While checking these changes on the Mac build I found that every panel the chart engine draws there has red and blue swapped, so I am not shipping a Mac 1.10.235 until that is fixed. The Mac download stays on 1.10.234.

1.10.234New

• A paper desk that trades the walls she calls

  Add Panel, Trading, Auto Desk. Arm it and the terminal rests a limit one point in front of the morning call wall and put wall, target four points, stop twelve through the wall, two touches per wall, flat at 15:55 ET. On positive-gamma days it does the same at the overnight Globex high and low. Paper fills on the live tape, one contract, on the same ladder you trade on, so every order and fill is right there. It never arms itself and it never touches a real account. The desk holds one position at a time: while a trade is open the other resting entries are pulled, and they come back on the first print after the exit, so the book is never long and short the same contract at once.

• Every trade lands in the journal with a note

  Each round trip is written into the journal as it closes, with a note that says which level, which regime, the target and the stop and how it ended, and the day card gets the same line. Pharos speaks the target and the stop after each fill. The panel keeps today's points, wins and losses, the whole record and its own log; the record also runs on the always-on stream and at sharpnel-trading.com/desk, misses included.

• The rule comes from a real sweep, and says so

  I swept the recorded ES tape from April to September with realistic fills: the wall fade won 88% of 42 trades, the overnight fade on positive-gamma days 95% of 44, together 91% of 82 for about two points a trade with seven losses in the sample. Seven losses is a small number, which is why it runs on paper in the open; the rule is a setting, so it changes when the record says so. A second sweep the same day tightened it: London stops taking new trades at 07:55 instead of 08:25, a wall is only faded when it sits inside the overnight range and not before 09:40, and a level that has been traded through needs a whole minute six points clear before it rests again rather than a single tick. On the same tape that is 91% of 146 London trades and 93% of 70 wall trades, with the worst day cut in half.

• Dark mode shows size on the ladder the way light mode does

  The dark depth ramp barely moved between a small and a big resting order; the gutter tiers sat within a hair of each other. Both now run from dim to the tape's own bright azure and red, so a big bid or offer reads at a glance on black as it already did on white. A Pro customer asked.

1.10.229New

• Ten quiet minutes, and she says so

  A quiet market used to sound like a tool that had stopped working. Now, ten minutes into silence inside the cash session, she says it in her own words: "It has gone quiet. Nothing worth calling yet." It is the lightest thing she can say — any real observation outranks it — and it comes in every desk language, from her own recorded lines.

• Your trial, in the status bar

  A desk on trial shows the days left next to the Pharos tile, with the first-charge date on hover and the subscription page one click away. The first session opens with a short card: the three kinds of lines she says, in the order that matters, and the two things to do first. Once per trial, then out of the way.

• The lock card knows

  Every Pro lock offers the five-day trial straight from the terminal. An account that has already had its trial is offered the paid desk instead — the button never promises something the site would refuse.

• Sign-in carries the machine

  The desktop hands a hashed machine id to the sign-in page. It ends a trial that starts on a machine another trial account already used; it is never the raw id, and a sign-in never depends on it.

• The cause, under the call

  When the ship calls a level, she now says what is moving the market you are on. "Second push into the call wall and it has not gone through. The S and P is leading, off zero point four percent in the last half hour. The Nasdaq is following it." One sentence, one voice, the same measured numbers the Correlated Markets panel shows — now read for you all session, whether that panel is open or not.

• Two reads, and silence when nothing lines up

  She names the market that is pulling yours only when it has moved harder, in the same direction, and the two are actually moving together over the last half hour — a broad move with no single culprit gets no name. And when your market has come off the one it usually trades with, she says so once: "The Nasdaq has come off the S and P over the last half hour. It is moving on its own." Every figure is a real thirty-minute change over joined minute bars. She says what is, never what will be. Pro desks only — the free tier's futures are delayed, and a delayed half hour would be a delayed cue.

• In all ten languages, in her voice

  The new lines are recorded in the ship's own voice in every language the desk speaks, with the word order each language actually uses. If a line cannot be said in your language it stays unsaid rather than switching to English. It is part of the ship's market watch: if you keep her watch off, this stays off with it.

• Ten languages everywhere, not just the menus

  Every panel, every dialog, every tooltip, and now the text the chart, the DOM and the gamma panels paint themselves — that last part had never been translated at all. The morning packet and the journal's analytics boards read in your language too: the equity curves, the P&L calendar, the levels scorecard and the exit efficiency board, down to the small print that tells you when a number is an audit rather than a signal. Same for the crypto options ladder, pattern recognition, the stock scorecard, the trail-stop manager, walk-forward, the volatility surface, the anomaly detector, the stock screener, the financials sheet and the fund browser.

• She says it once, in one language

  The ship used to greet you in your language and then say the same thing again in English a few seconds later. It doesn't any more. If it can't say a line in your language it stays quiet instead of switching.

• Chinese and Korean render in every panel, not just the chart

  On a machine without the system font installed, the panels used to show boxes while the chart beside them looked fine. The terminal now carries its own Chinese and Korean faces for every panel, and section headings and empty states that had slipped back to English — "policy speech stream", "no closed trades yet" — are in Spanish, Chinese and Korean again.

• The Pro card tells you the date

  Where a free account meets a Pro-only panel, the card now says what Pro costs and until when: $125 a month, or $1,125 for the year paid once, until 1 November — then $149. It also says the thing I would want to know before paying anyone for levels: the walls it draws are graded every session, and the record is public, misses included. I put the date there because that is where the question gets asked, not on a pricing page you read once.

• The voice that tells you what is moving your market

  I built this because of something a customer wrote to me on his way out. He said he was excited when he subscribed, opened the terminal, and there was so much on screen he could not read any of it — and that he could not stand looking at the DOM because he did not understand it. He was not wrong about the terminal. It is dense because I built it for myself. So Pharos now reads it for you. Leave the terminal on a second monitor and she speaks when something meaningful happens, and stays quiet the rest of the time. She will tell you the megacaps are pulling away from the index and a turn could be setting up. That it is the third push into the call wall and it still has not gone through. That bids outweigh offers six to one. That you took out the London low. That CPI is sixty seconds away. You do not have to learn to read a depth ladder to get what a depth ladder knows.

• She says one thing, not seven

  The hard part was not finding things to say, it was shutting up. One market event trips four different detectors, and my first version simply announced all four — four sentences in eight seconds, which is a smoke alarm, not a colleague. Everything she notices now goes into one place and a single line comes out: the most important fact leads, at most one supporting fact joins it, and only if it is about the same instrument seen a different way. Everything else is dropped and never mentioned late. There is a hard limit of one utterance every twenty seconds and one per instrument per minute, on top of that.

• And she will tell you to do nothing

  If two of her reads point opposite ways she says so, and says it is a pass. I do not think you will find another tool that does this, because a tool that goes quiet feels broken and everyone is incentivised to manufacture a setup instead. I would rather you skipped a trade on my say-so than took one. She states what the data shows and never what to do about it — no predictions, no targets, no profit and loss, and where a level is concerned she will never tell you it is going to hold. A level that holds three times is exactly the one that breaks on the fourth.

• You choose what is on the chart before you see it

  The first launch now asks one more question: gamma walls, footprint, TPO, and whether Pharos should speak. Nothing is pre-ticked. If you have been using the terminal a while you will get that one question by itself, once, because you never see the first-run screen again and I did not want a genuinely new feature to reach nobody who already has the app.

• The panels explain themselves in plain words now

  The question mark on each panel used to define the thing — the DOM was "a live price ladder showing resting bid and offer size". True, and useless if you are new: nobody asked what it is called. It now tells you what to look at first and what it means when you see it, and names the mistake almost everyone makes. The biggest number on the ladder is not the strongest level. Heavy volume at a price does not mean the buyers won. One huge print is not a signal. A wall is not a wall.

• Two things a customer was right to laugh at

  Someone screenshotted the Ask the Ship window into a public channel and laughed at it, and he was right on both counts. The greeting ended with a line about reading the tell and not the trade, which is a riddle rather than a sentence and tells a new user nothing. It is gone. And the whole window rendered black no matter which theme you were on, so in light mode you had a black box sitting in the middle of a white terminal. Every colour in it was hardcoded, which is why the theme could never reach it.

• Light mode, properly this time

  I have said light mode was done before and it kept not being done, so this time I photographed all 194 panels in it and measured how dark each one came out rather than trusting my eye. Four separate causes, and only one of them was about a panel. The big one: any panel you opened AFTER switching to light was born dark, because the re-colouring pass only ever ran during the switch itself — toggle the theme and the desk looked right, open a panel and it was black again. That is why it kept coming back. Then twenty-one panels had copied a colour into their own variable at startup, which freezes it forever; that is why the watch list was unreadable and why the P&L column washed out, since light deliberately darkens the blue and red so they carry on white. Forty-nine near-black backgrounds were hand-written into paint code. And every translucent empty-state overlay was invisible to the re-colouring, which alone made four panels look untouched. Dark is unchanged, and I mean that literally — all forty-eight render checks pass pixel-for-pixel.

• The ticker strip you can actually read

  The band under the menu bar had its background converted for light mode and every piece of text left as a dark-mode colour — including the one the PRICE is drawn in, which is near-white. On a white background that is white on white. Symbols and prices were pale ghosts and only the red change percent survived. All six colours read the live palette now, and every one of them clears the accessibility contrast bar on white.

• The quote wall reads as a market before you read a number

  The stock boards were a grid of outlined boxes with four numbers in the corners, and the only thing carrying the market was the change percent — so a name up seven percent looked identical to one up a third of a percent until you read both. On a wall of a hundred and thirty-five names that is a hundred and thirty-five reads to learn what the day did. Each tile now carries the move in its own background, scaled and signed, with a colour rail down its left edge, so the wall reads as a map and the numbers confirm it. A flat name is no longer painted as an up name — that bug made a quiet session look like a wall of green. And you can click a name now: the whole desk follows it. Right-click to add or drop it from MY LIST, which was possible before but advertised nowhere, and a feature nobody can find is a feature nobody has.

• A free account opens on a desk with nothing locked on it

  A free Explorer used to land on a layout containing the DOM, which is a paid panel — so the desk whose whole job was to avoid showing you a wall of padlocks put one in the second place you look. There is a proper Explorer desk now: chart with volume profile, your watchlist, the week's economic calendar and the newswire. Every panel on it works without paying, and every panel on it has something in it on day one — my first attempt used the halts tape and the session stats, and both of those are empty until something happens, which is the worst possible thing to show somebody thirty seconds after they install.

• One panel could take the live book down with it

  If your desk had the dealer-gamma panel on it, the depth ladder would sometimes come up saying NO LIVE FEED with no gamma on the chart — while the same desk without that panel was completely fine. The panel was innocent. It asks for a paid data channel, the server correctly answers that the channel needs a subscription, and the terminal was filing that under 'your session is broken' — which puts EVERY ladder in the app into recovery and tries to refresh a token that was never the problem. An account that simply is not subscribed has nothing to recover, so the ladders stayed dead. Those are two different answers now. This one landed on the default desk, so it was somebody's first minute in the terminal.

• Correlated Markets finally fills its correlation columns

  The r and r30 columns on that panel had never once shown a number since it shipped — every row printed dashes. Two independent reasons, either of which was enough. The panel's symbol lookup had a typo one digit long, so it was asking the engine for data under a key nothing had ever written; it could not read bars for any symbol, ever, and it failed silently. And nothing ever fetched the minutes those columns need — they were supposed to accumulate while you sat there with the panel open, so a freshly opened panel had none. It pulls real one-minute history now and the columns are populated on the first paint.

• Smaller things

  Session Stats used to say LOADING forever when there was nothing to load, which is indistinguishable from a broken feed; it says NO BARS after a moment now. A scanner hit can be spoken aloud — every voice callout took a price, so an alert with no price stayed silent rather than invent one, and there is now a lane for events whose only honest content is their name. EUROPE joined China and US Tape as a desk on the Presets menu. And the terminal speaks four languages a little more completely, including the three new desks.