The squawk

On old trading floors there was a squawk box: an intercom that broadcast news and order flow across the room so traders never had to look away from the tape. You kept your eyes on prices and your ears on the room. We rebuilt that idea for a one-person desk. The squawk is the harness's voice channel — a spoken layer that calls out the handful of things worth interrupting for, so the trader can step away from the glass and still stay in the loop.

What it says is narrow by design. Fills. Risk events. A threshold breach. A piece of news that actually moves the position. It runs hands-free and eyes-free, which matters more than it sounds. A person can only watch so many screens, and on a solo desk attention is the scarce resource — the one thing you cannot buy more of. The squawk turns the harness from something you have to stare at into something you can listen to, which means the desk can keep running while the human gets a coffee, takes a call, or simply looks away.

The hard part was never the speaking. Text-to-speech is a solved problem. The hard part is choosing what not to say. A squawk that talks constantly is just noise with a voice, and noise trains you to stop listening — the worst outcome for a channel whose whole job is to be trusted when it does speak. So most of the design work went into the opposite of speech: deciding the small set of events that genuinely deserve a human's attention, and staying silent for everything else. That is the same risk-first, human-in-the-loop discipline we apply everywhere. Interrupt a person only when interrupting them is worth it.

Under the hood, the squawk is not a separate system watching the market. It subscribes to the same event stream the engine already produces — the fills, the risk checks, the kill-switch trips — and speaks a chosen subset of it. So what you hear is exactly what happened, drawn from the same source the book runs on, not a secondhand summary assembled after the fact. If the engine acted, the squawk can say so, in the same breath.

Keeping a human in the loop only works if the loop actually reaches the human. Screens assume you are looking. The squawk does not. It is how the desk gets your attention when it has earned it, and how it respects your attention by staying quiet when it hasn't. That is the whole point: not a system that talks, but one that knows when to.