Series: Openalice (1/6)
OpenAlice Beginner's Course: Build Your One-Person AI Trading Studio in 5 Articles
Most people's image of "AI trading" looks something like this: a mysterious black box, a pile of indicators nobody understands, and one day your account goes to zero — if you're not a quant engineer by trade, it feels like you're not even allowed to play.
OpenAlice is built to break down exactly that barrier.
It's an open-source AI trading agent that integrates research, analysis, order execution, and automated monitoring into a single conversational interface. You don't need to write Python strategies, spin up a trading server, or juggle ten monitoring windows at once — you just talk to the AI, and let it do the work.
This five-article series takes OpenAlice apart piece by piece and walks you through it, one stop at a time.
What Is OpenAlice
OpenAlice describes itself as "a one-person Wall Street." That's not a marketing line — it's an accurate description of what it's designed to do:
- Research — Cross-asset market data (stocks, crypto, commodities, forex, macroeconomics), all accessible through a single interface
- Trading — Multiple brokerage accounts consolidated into a single Unified Trading Account (UTA); the AI only interacts with the UTA, never directly with broker APIs
- Automation — Cron schedules, Heartbeat market monitoring, Webhook triggers, all running on the same event log
- Memory — The Brain system gives the AI persistent working memory across conversations, so you don't have to re-explain context every time
In short: what used to require a three-person analyst team, OpenAlice tries to let one person handle alone.
Who This Series Is For
- Engineers or developers who want to explore AI trading but don't know where to start
- Traders who are already monitoring manually and want to automate parts of their workflow
- Anyone curious about the intersection of "AI Agents + financial markets" who wants to understand before diving in
- Anyone who thinks "quantitative trading seems hard" but just needs a good entry point
If you just want a quick answer to what OpenAlice can do, go straight to 01 - What Is OpenAlice. If you want to follow along hands-on, start from 02 - Installation and Quick Start and work through it step by step.
Series Reading Map
Each of the five articles focuses on one aspect. They can be read individually, but together they form a complete introduction to the OpenAlice workflow:
1. What Is OpenAlice? The Core Concepts Behind a One-Person AI Trading Studio Build the overall framework first — why "conversational trading" is the direction OpenAlice chose, and what fundamentally separates it from traditional quant tools.
2. Installation and Quick Start: Get OpenAlice Running in 5 Minutes From cloning the repo to your first conversation — environment setup, a tour of the Web UI, and completing your first research query.
3. Trading-as-Git: Manage Your Trades Like Version-Controlled Code OpenAlice's most interesting core design — mapping the trading workflow to Git: stage orders, commit with a message, push to execute. This article breaks down why this design makes trading decisions clearer.
4. Research and Analysis Module: Cross-Asset Market Data and Fundamentals in One Place OpenAlice has a TypeScript-native OpenBB engine built in, supporting stocks, crypto, and macro data. This article walks you through price queries, fundamental research, and news monitoring in practice.
5. Automation and Heartbeat: Let AI Monitor the Market While You Sleep Cron scheduling, Heartbeat mechanisms, Webhook triggers. This article turns your OpenAlice from "it only moves when you ask" into "it proactively tells you what's worth your attention."
Recommended Reading Order
Read in order: 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 — first understand why it's designed this way, then set up the environment, then learn the core trading workflow, round out the research tools, and finally get the whole system running on automation.
If you're already up and running, feel free to jump to 3 or 4 as needed.
Back to the Series Starting Point
You're at the beginning of the OpenAlice series. The full learning map for the whole journey is right above.