Canary MCP

Canary

繁體中文：網站及入門指南 · 简体中文：网站及入门指南

A risk desk for your Interactive Brokers account. It reads your account for you and your AI agent, checks it against your limits, and, in the trading build, places the trades you authorise.

Canary runs beside your IB Gateway or TWS and nothing runs on a server of mine. It tells you what needs attention today. It runs twenty discipline checks against limits you set and names the ones your positions breach. It shows exposure by underlying. Canary Edge shows what the price did 1, 5 and 20 sessions after your past stock and ETF trades, from your broker statements, where a decision repeated often enough to count. The same readings come as text, as JSON, in a paired phone app, and as MCP tools for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor or Zed.

It comes in two builds. The standard binary reads; it has no compiled order path. The trading binary, a separate download, also executes orders, and only the ones you authorised: a transaction you confirmed, or a close or reduction the daemon runs under a bucket you listed in your written policy, a list that ships empty. Every order is pinned to one account, client ID and mode, consumes a preview token for that exact draft, is journaled with its origin before it is sent, and passes the risk policy's order limits, the mandate gate and the freeze. An agent trades only through the gated CLI. The MCP server has no order or preview tool in any build. Canary never decides a trade on its own.

[Documentation](https://osauer.dev/canary/docs/) · Install · First session · Agentic trading · Canary Edge · MCP tools · Safety · Privacy

Start

You need IB Gateway 10.37+ or TWS with API socket access enabled, an IBKR Pro account, and macOS or Linux on arm64 or amd64. Paper and live both work. There is no Windows build; use WSL.

Terminal, and every MCP host. One signed binary in ~/.local/bin:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/osauer/canary/main/install.sh | sh

canary status # show which Gateway and account Canary reached canary brief # review what changed and what needs attention

The install guide shows how to inspect the script first and covers every other installation path.

Claude Desktop. Download the MCP Bundle, canary.mcpb, open it with Claude Desktop, then quit and relaunch Claude. The walkthrough covers the first connection.

Any other MCP host. Install the binary as above, then point the host at its absolute path; which canary prints it.

{

"mcpServers": { "canary": { "command": "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/canary", "args": ["mcp"] } } }

A first question that works in any host:

What needs attention today, and which data is missing or stale?

_Canary Edge in the paired app, rendered from synthetic data: what the price did after past decisions, and how much evidence supports each row._

Ways in

MCP hosts

Ask plain questions rather than naming tools. The host guide covers Claude Code, Cursor, Zed, continuously running agents, logs, and connection checks. The generated MCP reference lists every tool and its schema.

Terminal and paired app

Every data command supports --json:

canary account

canary positions --by underlying canary edge canary rules canary regime --explain canary stress --details

Run canary status first for connection problems and canary data health for missing or stale data. canary --help and the CLI reference list every command and flag.

For the paired app, run canary app on the machine that owns the Gateway or TWS session, then run canary app pair and scan the QR code. The app guide covers pairing, remote access, and push notifications.

Experimental: moomoo and Futu through OpenD

Canary can also read a Futu or moomoo account through OpenD, Futu's local gateway, while OpenD is running and logged in. This support is experimental. Reading balances and holdings, order and fill history, and converting to the base currency have been tested only against a stand-in for OpenD written for Canary's tests, so check what Canary shows against your broker. Canary cannot place, change or cancel orders through OpenD: it refuses the request and sends nothing to your broker.

Add this to ~/.config/ibkr/config.toml:

[broker]

kind = "opend"

With one real account on your login, Canary uses it. With several, it picks none: canary status lists them, and you set account under [opend] to its id. A simulated account is never picked: to use one, set account to its id.

With this setting, Canary shows account balances and stock and ETF positions, and quotes for the Hong Kong and US markets where your OpenD login has the quote rights; no other market's quotes have been read. A holding in a market without a quote right shows the price OpenD reports with the holding, not a market quote. Options, futures and anything else in the account appear in a separate list at the value OpenD reports, unconverted and not checked by Canary. Canary's exposure figures and checks against your limits do not count them, so those figures do not cover your whole account. Holdings outside the account's base currency are converted at a rate worked out from OpenD's own account totals, not a quoted rate; where that is not possible they are not measured, and the checks against your limits report that they cannot judge them. The regime, portfolio stress and the market overview answer in part, tested only against that stand-in: OpenD has no VIX term structure, USD/JPY or gamma, so the regime's headline always reads "Market state undefined — data incomplete". Many features are not available, among them daily P&L, Edge, statement reporting, the market tape and technical analysis; canary status lists most of them. Canary with moomoo and Futu has the details.

Each daemon serves one broker. To run OpenD beside IBKR, start a second daemon with its own XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_STATE_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME, XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and CANARY_SOCKET. The configuration reference lists every key.

Go wire-protocol library

pkg/ibkr is a clean-room Go library for the TWS wire protocol. It transports broker requests only. Its API reference is on pkg.go.dev, and its statement coverage is updated on each push to main as a line-by-line report.

To use the daemon client or the current pkg/ibkr from your own Go program, get the module at the tag of the release your daemon runs (for pkg/ibkr alone, any current release tag), for example:

go get github.com/osauer/canary/v2@canary--v3.36.1

Use the canary-- tag; Go refuses the plain v3.36.1 tag for a /v2 module. Your go.mod then records a version of the form v2.8.5-0. - , which is expected. Take the client from the same release as the daemon: the daemon refuses a request with a field it does not know, so a newer client can be refused. @latest and go get -u move the module to the newest v2 tag, which is older than the daemon client and does not contain it. pkg.go.dev shows that older version too, so its pkg/ibkr reference describes v2.8.5, not your release.

go install github.com/osauer/canary/v2/cmd/canary@latest installs the v2 CLI, not the current v3 release; use the installer for the binary. Start with the package documentation and the wire protocol page.

Safety and privacy

The standard binary has no compiled order path, and the installer, updater and MCP Bundle never install the trading binary. The trading binary executes what you authorised and nothing else. The daemon checks every order at preview, at admission and at the final send: account, client ID and mode pins, the preview token for that draft, the journal entry written before the send, the risk policy's order limits, the mandate gate and the freeze. Gated orders has the detail.

Canary has no telemetry and does not send account IDs, balances, quantities, or P/L to the maintainer. PRIVACY.md is the data map. SECURITY.md covers the threat model and signed releases.

Documentation and legal

• Daily desk workflow
• Troubleshooting
• Configuration
• Release and update policy
• Contributing

Canary is an independent third-party client for Interactive Brokers' publicly documented TWS API. It is not built, endorsed, sponsored, or supported by Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. or its affiliates. pkg/ibkr redistributes no Interactive Brokers code, libraries, jars, or market data. Canary's OpenD client is likewise independent and is not built, endorsed, sponsored, or supported by Futu or its affiliates; pkg/futu includes protocol definitions from Futu's public client under the Apache License 2.0, as its notice sets out. Nothing here is investment advice.

Canary is a private project of Oliver Sauer.

MIT. See LICENSE.