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Forven is a free, open-source, self-hosted quant research workspace that builds, tests, kills and promotes trading strategies through a disciplined gauntlet — by hand, with its own agents, or with the AI client you already use.
Forven is a free, open-source (AGPL-3.0), self-hosted quant research workspace for retail quant traders. You turn a trading idea into a strategy, test it on data it was never tuned on, kill what doesn't survive, and forward-test the survivors on live market data with simulated fills.
It runs entirely on your own machine. Clone the repository, start it, and your strategies, data and keys never leave it. There is no account, no sign-up and no paid tier.
The idea behind it is one opinionated process: build → test → kill → promote. A strategy reaches paper trading only when it isn't broken or clearly losing. It can go live only when its forward trades confirm its backtest and its evidence survives a battery of robustness checks, a correction for how many variants were tried, and one final test on recent data that research never saw. The process is the product.
Start with the walkthroughs
New to Forven? The walkthroughs take one task each, start to finish, with a screenshot of every screen.
All walkthroughs
The path from a fresh install to a strategy paper-trading on live data, plus the agents and your own AI client.
1. First launch & setup
Start Forven, get through the setup wizard, and learn the screen you land on.
2. Get your first market data
Download BTC, ETH and SOL history with the Starter preset.
3. Build a strategy
Turn an idea into entry and exit rules in the Strategy Creator — no code, no AI key.
Not installed yet? Start with Install.
The stages
Every strategy moves Quick screen → Gauntlet → Paper → Live (quick_screen → gauntlet → paper → live_graduated), each behind a gate; anything that fails or can't be fairly tested goes to the graveyard. Paper is where Forven stops by default. See the pipeline.
Three ways to work
- By hand. Build a strategy from rules or in Python in the Strategy Creator, check it in Manual Backtest, and send it to The Forge. No AI key needed.
- With Forven's agents, through ideas. In The Forge, click + Submit idea and describe what you think the market does. The Strategy Developer writes the idea up — thesis, mechanism, what would disprove it — and builds strategies to test it. In Auto mode the agents also write ideas of their own within a daily budget. They run on your own model-provider keys, and they cannot place, size or close positions.
- With your own AI client over MCP. Connect Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any MCP client to Forven's MCP server (21 tools), and it can design, backtest, validate and promote strategies. See Connect Claude Code or Cursor.
Whichever you use, the gates don't change.
How the docs are organized
| Section | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Walkthroughs | Step-by-step guides with screenshots, in the order you'll need them |
| Concepts | How Forven thinks: the pipeline, the gauntlet, promotion gates, metrics, regimes, ideas, autonomy modes and the philosophy behind them |
| The app, screen by screen | One page per screen in the sidebar, from the Dashboard to Settings |
| Reference | The CLI, configuration, environment variables, the API, the strategy catalog and writing custom strategies |
The sidebar also groups pages on the research engine, trading and safety, AI and integrations, operations, and help. The glossary defines every term, and What's new lists recent changes month by month.
A note on safety
Forven is a research tool. Backtest and paper results describe the past and a simulation; they are not predictive of future performance. Any numbers in this documentation are illustrative. Nothing here is financial advice, and Forven is not a signal service, copy trading, or a promise of profit.
The supported way to run Forven is paper trading: simulated fills on live market data, with no order ever leaving your machine. Live / mainnet trading is not a supported feature — execution defaults to paper, and wiring real exchange keys to trade live is unsupported and entirely at your own risk. You cannot skip paper.
About these docs
Docs version
These docs describe Forven's main branch as of 2026-10-20 (commit 05a14d82). The version number is still 0.1.34.
Forven is free and open source under AGPL-3.0-or-later. Every feature is yours the moment you clone and run it; see Everything is free.
Related
- How Forven works — the architecture and how a strategy travels end to end
- Install — clone the repository and run it on your own machine
- Walkthroughs — from a fresh install to your first paper strategy
- What's new — recent changes, month by month