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What is OpenAlice

Your one-person Wall Street. Alice is an AI trading agent that covers equities, crypto, commodities, forex, and macro — from research and analysis through position entry, ongoing management, to exit.

Three Pillars

Full-spectrum

Analyze and trade across asset classes from a single workspace. Multiple brokers — CCXT crypto exchanges, Alpaca for US equities, Interactive Brokers for stocks/options/futures/bonds — combine into one unified surface. You're never stuck with "I can see it but can't trade it." Commodities and FX data are first-class too, so a macro thesis can flow directly into positions.

Full-lifecycle

Not just entry signals. Alice covers the entire trading lifecycle:

  • Research — fundamentals, financials, news, technicals, macro context
  • Position entry — sizing, order type selection, bracket orders
  • Ongoing monitoring — heartbeat check-ins that only speak up when something matters
  • Risk management — guards catch violations before they reach the broker; snapshots track equity over time
  • Exit decisions — same reasoning stack, closing is just another commit

This runs 24/7 in the background. You don't have to be online for Alice to notice a drawdown or a news event.

Full-control

Every trade goes through version history and safety checks, and requires your explicit approval before execution. The workflow is Trading-as-Git: Alice stages orders, commits them with a message and an 8-char hash, and calls tradingPush — which doesn't execute. It asks you to approve from the Web UI, Telegram, or any connected channel. You see every step. You can stop every step.

Guards are a second line of defense: pre-execution rules (max position size, cooldown, symbol whitelist) that reject operations automatically before they reach the broker.

Why Local

Alice runs on your own machine. Not in the cloud, not as a hosted service. Trading involves private keys and real money, and that trust can't be outsourced — you should know exactly where your credentials live and who can reach them. All state (config, sessions, trading history, brain memory, news archive, event log) lives in data/ as files you own. No database, no containers, just JSON, JSONL, and Markdown.

This also means you can inspect, edit, backup, or version-control everything with standard tools. If you ever want to move off OpenAlice, your data isn't locked behind an API.

OpenAlice is experimental software in active development. Many features and interfaces are incomplete and subject to breaking changes. Do not use this software for live trading with real funds unless you fully understand and accept the risks involved.

What Alice Does

Trading

  • Unified Trading Account (UTA) — multiple brokers combine into unified workspaces. AI interacts with UTAs, never with brokers directly. See Accounts & Brokers.
  • Trading-as-Git — stage orders, commit with a message, push to execute. Full history reviewable with commit hashes.
  • Guard pipeline — max position size, cooldown, symbol whitelist, plus your own custom guards.
  • Account snapshots — periodic and event-driven state capture with equity curve visualization.

Research & Analysis

  • Market data — equity, crypto, commodity, currency, and macro data via a TypeScript-native OpenBB engine that runs in-process. Unified cross-asset symbol search and technical indicator calculator with an Excel-like formula syntax.
  • Fundamental research — company profiles, financial statements, ratios, earnings calendar, insider trading, and market movers. Currently deepest for equities, expanding to other asset classes.
  • News — background RSS collection with archive search (globNews, grepNews, readNews).

Automation

An append-only event log sits at the center of Alice. All system activity — trades, messages, scheduled fires, heartbeat results — flows through as typed events with real-time subscriptions. Automation features are listeners on this bus:

  • Cron scheduling — cron expressions, intervals, or one-shot timestamps. On fire, emits an event → listener routes through AI → delivers reply to your last-used channel.
  • Heartbeat — a special cron job that periodically reviews market conditions, filters by active hours, and only reaches out when something matters.
  • Webhooks — inbound event triggers from external systems (planned).

Interface

  • Web UI — chat with real-time streaming, sub-channels, portfolio dashboard with equity curve, and full config management.
  • Telegram — mobile access with a trading approval panel.
  • MCP server — tool exposure for external agents; separate MCP Ask endpoint lets other agents converse with Alice.

And More

  • Multi-provider AI — Claude (Agent SDK with OAuth or API key), Vercel AI SDK (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google), or Codex — all managed as named profiles, switchable at runtime.
  • Brain — persistent working memory and emotion tracking across conversations.
  • Evolution mode — permission escalation that gives Alice full project access including Bash, enabling self-modification.

Next Steps