Terminal Access & MCP¶
Overview¶
Everything you do in the web terminal — check a price, read your positions, watch your drawdown, place a bracketed order — can also be done from your own command line, by an AI assistant you control.
E8 Markets runs an MCP server (Model Context Protocol). It is the same connection the E8 chat assistant uses, exposed so you can point your own tools at it: Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Desktop, or a script you wrote yourself.
Two things this unlocks that the web terminal cannot:
- Ask in plain English. "How much room do I have before my daily loss limit, and which open position is closest to its stop?" — one question, answered from live account data.
- Leave a loop running. A job that checks your drawdown every fifteen minutes while you sleep, writes your trade journal at the end of the session, or screens forty symbols against your own indicator rules before you sit down.
Read this before automating anything: Safety & Limits. An API key created on the settings page can place and close real orders. That is the default, not an opt-in.
Q: What do I need to get started?
A: An E8 Markets account, an API key, and a client that speaks MCP. Minting the key takes about thirty seconds and connecting Claude Code is one command:
# 1. Get a key at https://trade.e8markets.com/settings → API Keys
# 2. Connect Claude Code
claude mcp add --transport http e8-terminal https://trade.e8markets.com/api/mcp
# 3. Ask it something
claude -p "Using the e8-terminal tools, what's my account equity and how much room is left before my daily loss limit?"
Claude Code will open your browser to approve access the first time. Full instructions for every client — including Cursor, Claude Desktop, and plain curl — are in Connecting Your Terminal.
Q: What can I actually reach?
A: Grouped by what they answer:
| You want to know | Tools | Needs |
|---|---|---|
| What's the price, what are the candles, what does the chart look like | e8_trade_asset_get, e8_trade_history, e8_trade_chart, e8_trade_asset_list |
any key |
| What's in the news | e8_news, e8_news_ticker, e8_news_categories |
any key |
| What are my accounts, positions, and orders | e8_accounts_list, e8_account_info, e8_positions_list, e8_orders_list, e8_order_get |
read:trade |
| How close am I to breaching a limit | e8_account_limits |
read:trade |
| How have I actually been trading | e8_analytics_user, e8_analytics_account, e8_milestones_list, e8_milestone_progress |
read:trade |
| Dashboards | e8_dashboard_get, e8_dashboard_suggest |
any key |
| Place, cancel, and close | e8_order_place, e8_order_cancel, e8_position_close, e8_positions_close_all |
trade:execute |
Full parameters and gotchas: Tool Reference.
Q: What's worth building first?
A: Start with something read-only that saves you a daily chore. The Recipes page has six, ordered by risk:
| # | Recipe | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Morning brief | Overnight moves, relevant news, and your open positions in one paragraph |
| 2 | Risk watch | Alerts you when your daily-loss headroom drops below a threshold |
| 3 | Trade journal | Turns closed orders into a written journal you can review weekly |
| 4 | Custom screener | Ranks symbols against indicator rules you define |
| 5 | Pre-trade check | Validates size against free margin and distance to your limits before you click |
| 6 | Guarded auto-execution | Places at most one bracketed order per run, on Demo, with a trip wire |
Recipes 1–5 cannot lose you money. Recipe 6 can, which is why it is last and why it defaults to a Demo account.
Q: Does the assistant give me trading advice?
A: No, and you should not build one that does. These tools return data — prices, candles, your balances, your drawdown. The trading decision stays yours.
The distinction that matters when you write your own prompts: "RSI on EURUSD is 72.4" is a fact your harness computed. "Sell EURUSD" is advice, and an agent that generates it is an agent that will eventually generate it from a hallucinated number. Keep your automations reporting and gating, not deciding.
Q: Is there technical analysis built in?
A: Not over MCP. The E8 chat assistant has its own indicator tools, but they are internal to the chat product and are not part of this server. You get raw OHLCV candles from e8_trade_history and compute what you need.
That is a feature more than a limitation — your RSI is your RSI, with your period and your timeframe, not someone else's defaults. Building Your Own Harness shows how, with a worked example.
Q: What does this cost me in rate limits?
A: An OAuth connection gets 60 calls per minute and 10,000 per day. API keys carry their own per-key limits. A fifteen-minute risk-watch loop uses roughly a hundred calls a day — comfortable. A screener that pulls candles for forty symbols every five minutes is not. Safety & Limits covers budgeting and what a 429 looks like.
Q: Where do I go if it does not work?
A: Connecting Your Terminal ends with a verification script and the three failure modes you are likely to hit — a rejected credential, a rate limit, and an edge-security challenge — with what each one looks like on screen.
Next steps¶
| Page | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Connecting Your Terminal | Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Desktop, raw HTTP, and how to verify |
| Tool Reference | Every tool, its parameters, and the ones with sharp edges |
| Recipes | Six working automations, ordered by risk |
| Building Your Own Harness | Indicators from candles, keeping state, scheduling |
| Safety & Limits | Scopes, read-only keys, rate limits, kill switches |
| Agent Skill File | A ready-made skill so your agent knows the conventions |