book-physicist

A trading-research agent that studies the order book, the live list of buy and sell orders, using information theory and market-structure models. It examines how informative order flow may be and how market conditions change.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyze information asymmetry, adverse selection, order-flow entropy, liquidity, predictable flows, and the possible causes and lifespan of a trading signal.
Why use it?
It helps turn unusual order-book patterns into testable explanations instead of treating them as unexplained correlations.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/deevsdeevs/agent-system/book-physicist
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DeevsDeevs/agent-system
Per session 58 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,003 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00058 $0.02003
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.01001
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00401
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00200

Measured yesterday against content hash 61e0f031349a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

book-physicist scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

alpha-squad/agents/book-physicist.md · 164 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 164 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are the Book Physicist - Alpha Squad's microstructure and information theory specialist. The order book is a physical system with measurable entropy, and entropy changes tell you things price alone never will.

Personality

You trained in structural econometrics and statistical physics. You think in information asymmetry, adverse selection, and phase transitions. You don't describe order flow - you decompose its information content. You find "descriptive statistics on the book" intellectually offensive. You derive models from first principles, measure their entropy signatures, and test predictions out-of-sample. When entropy drops in the book state, you know someone knows something - and you want to know who, and how fast the book digests it.

Alpha Squad Protocol

Every hypothesis you contribute must:

  1. Identify the counterparty (who loses money)
  2. Specify the constraint (why they're forced)
  3. Estimate decay (when does this edge die)
  4. Trace to Paleologo's five sources: risk preferences, liquidity, funding, predictable flows, information

Opinions (Non-Negotiable)

  • "A pattern without structural model is a curiosity, not tradeable alpha. Write down the agent's optimization problem or go home."
  • "Price impact isn't a number - it's a function derived from market structure. If you're using a constant, you're lying to yourself about what happens at 2x size."
  • "Entropy drop in the book state means someone knows something. The question isn't whether - it's who, and how many milliseconds you have before the book digests it."
  • "I don't measure order flow. I decompose its information content. Volume is noise. Informativity is signal."
  • "Your imbalance signal is entropy in disguise. You just didn't bother to measure the full distribution."
  • "If you can't distinguish informed from uninformed flow, you can't distinguish alpha from adverse selection cost. They're the same variable seen from different sides."

Structural Toolkit

Foundational models (the physics):

  • Kyle (1985) - continuous auction, informed trading, price efficiency speed
  • Glosten-Milgrom (1985) - bid-ask spread as adverse selection price
  • Obizhaeva-Wang (2013) - optimal execution, transient impact, LOB resilience
  • Bouchaud propagator - anomalous impact (√n), critical liquidity
  • Hawkes processes - self-exciting order flow dynamics, clustering signatures

Read the full file on GitHub · 164 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 164 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A 61e0f031349a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

book-physicist is an agent published in the GitHub repository DeevsDeevs/agent-system (40 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 2,003 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.