FAQ

Straight answers to the obvious questions about Forven — is it local, is it free, is my money safe, does it auto-trade, will it make me money.

Short, honest answers to the questions most people ask first. Forven is a free, open-source, self-hosted quant research lab: it helps you build, test, kill, and promote trading strategies through a disciplined walk-forward gauntlet before any real capital is involved. If you want the longer version of any answer, the linked pages go deeper.

This page covers live trading, risk, and results, so the plain version up front: Forven is a research tool. Backtest and paper results are not predictive of future performance, and nothing here is financial advice.

The basics

Is Forven really local?

Yes. Forven runs entirely on your machine. The backend (FastAPI), the UI (SvelteKit), the database (SQLite), and the market-data lake (Parquet files) all live on your computer; your state sits under a single directory, FORVEN_HOME (defaults to ~/.forven). You self-host it — clone the repo and run it. That directory holds your forven.db, config.json, encrypted credentials, the agents' workspace, and database backups.

There is no Forven cloud doing your research, and no Forven account. The only network calls Forven makes are the ones you'd expect from a tool that studies markets: pulling market data, talking to your chosen LLM provider (if you use the optional agent layer), checking GitHub for updates, and — only if you choose to wire it up yourself — talking to an exchange.

Where does my data live?

In FORVEN_HOME. A typical layout:

# Default workspace location on Windows
echo $env:USERPROFILE\.forven
# Contains: forven.db, forven_lab.db, config.json, auth.json, workspace/, backups/

You can point FORVEN_HOME somewhere else with an environment variable before launch. Market data lives in a Parquet data lake beside it (see managing market data). Your strategies, backtests, and settings never leave your machine unless you move them.

Is my money safe? Is my account safe?

Forven cannot touch money it has no keys for. There are several deliberate layers between you and an accidental trade:

Paper is the supported mode. Execution defaults to paper — simulated fills on live market data, with no order ever leaving your machine — and there is no supported live / mainnet path. The in-app execution-mode switch only accepts paper. Wiring real exchange keys to trade live is unsupported and at your own risk.
Mainnet is default-deny. Real-money orders on HyperLiquid are refused unless you set the environment variable FORVEN_ALLOW_MAINNET=1 yourself. The default is 0, and there is no switch for it in the app.
Your exchange keys stay on your machine. HyperLiquid credentials live in Settings → HyperLiquid, encrypted at rest (or in environment variables you set), and are never sent anywhere but the exchange itself. Forven refuses mainnet trading with a withdrawal-capable master key: the safe setup is a separate API wallet that can trade but not withdraw.
Hard risk controls. A kill-switch, daily-loss halt, drawdown limit, and per-trade risk cap sit in front of every live order, and mainnet leverage is capped at 3×.

See Going live safely for the full pre-capital checklist.

Cost & licensing

Is Forven free?

Yes — completely. Forven is free and open source under AGPL-3.0-or-later. There are no paid tiers, no subscription, no license key, and no account — every feature is included the moment you clone and run it. That includes the full local lab, the autonomous research daemon, paper trading, the risk controls, and the AI agent layer. See Everything is free.

Do I have to pay Forven for AI usage?

No. Forven never resells model tokens. The agent layer is bring-your-own-key: you connect your own provider account, and you pay that provider directly for what you use. Forven routes requests; it doesn't mark them up. See Models & providers (BYOK).

Do I need an LLM key at all?

No. You can download data, build strategies from rules in the Strategy Creator, backtest, run the gauntlet, and paper-trade with no LLM key whatsoever. A key is only needed for the AI features: the agents, the autonomous strategy-creation loop, building strategies from an idea you submit, the assistant, and the Strategy Creator's AI assist. You can also drive Forven from an AI client you already use, such as Claude, through the MCP server.

How it trades

Does Forven auto-trade my money?

No. Paper is the supported mode and the default, and there is no supported live / mainnet path. Several things would have to be true at once before a single real order could be placed, and you would have to do all of them deliberately and at your own risk:

You have set FORVEN_ALLOW_MAINNET=1 in the environment (default-deny is 0).
You have switched HyperLiquid testnet off — the app makes you type LIVE to save that — and supplied your own mainnet credentials through an API wallet.
A strategy has survived the pipeline, including paper, and you promoted it to live: a typed GO LIVE plus a per-asset notional ceiling. An Allow automatic go-live setting exists, but it is off by default and saving it on also needs a typed LIVE.

Read Execution modes: paper vs live for why live is unsupported and how the (at-your-own-risk) switch works.

What exchanges does Forven support?

The (unsupported) live path routes orders to HyperLiquid only — testnet by default, mainnet only when you explicitly allow it. For market data — the candles you backtest and paper-trade on — Forven uses Binance's USD-M perpetuals as the research series every backtest reads, with Binance Vision archives for deep history. Data → Get data can also download from OKX, Bybit, Coinbase and Kraken (spot) and Hyperliquid (perps, latest 5,000 candles), stored as separate venue series, and you can import your own CSV files. Data sources and execution are separate concerns; see data sources.

What's the difference between paper and live trades?

Paper trades fill inside Forven at the live Binance price, with modeled fees and slippage, and are recorded locally. No order ever reaches an exchange. Each paper strategy runs in its own isolated session.
Live trades are real orders placed on HyperLiquid, filled at exchange prices, carrying real order IDs.

Both run on the same execution kernel as the backtest, so a difference between them is a difference in the market, not the code. Still, paper PnL is not a one-to-one proxy for live PnL — a simulated fill never waits in a real order book. Treat paper as a discipline check, not a profit forecast. More in Paper trading.

If I do go live, what stops a runaway loss?

Several hard controls, enforced before and during execution:

Control	Default	What it does
`max_drawdown_pct`	`30`	Trips the kill-switch and closes every live position when drawdown from the high-water mark reaches it
`max_daily_loss_pct`	`2`	Halts new live entries for the rest of the UTC day once same-day loss passes it
`max_risk_per_trade_pct`	`10`	Clamps any single order's risk to this share of the account
Circuit breakers	per-breaker	Pause exchange calls when HyperLiquid itself is unhealthy (true outages, not rate-limits)

The kill-switch is autonomous: it can close positions without waiting for you. Values above are illustrative defaults once settings are saved (before that, a stricter built-in profile applies) — you configure them in Settings → Trading. See Risk controls and Going live safely.

Platform & support

How do I install it? Is there a download?

There is no downloadable app or installer. Forven is self-hosted from source: you clone the repository and run a launcher script (start_all.ps1 on Windows, start_all.sh on macOS/Linux), which builds and starts the stack on your own machine. You need Python 3.11+, Node.js, and git. See Install for the exact steps.

What platforms does it run on?

Anywhere the stack runs — Windows, macOS, and Linux. The launcher scripts cover Windows (start_all.ps1) and macOS/Linux (start_all.sh). See Install and Running from source.

Something's broken — where do I start?

The Troubleshooting & recovery page covers the common ones: the warnings a fresh install shows, idle agents, a stuck strategy, scheduler locks, and MCP connection problems. For day-to-day health, Diagnostics and the System health chip on The Forge's Engine card tell you what's green, amber, or red.

Results & expectations

Will Forven make me money?

No one can promise that, and Forven won't pretend to. Forven is a research instrument, not a money machine. Its job is to make your process honest: to test strategies out-of-sample, to surface overfitting, and to kill ideas that only looked good in-sample.

The whole design assumes that in-sample metrics lie and that the only durable retail edge is disciplined process. Any number you see in the app — a backtest Sharpe, a paper PnL curve — is an artifact of historical or simulated data and is illustrative only. It does not predict the future. See Philosophy for why the tool is built to be skeptical of its own results.

Why does it keep killing my strategies?

Because that's the point. The quick screen and the door into paper kill strategies that are broken, leaky or clearly losing: too few trades even on a widened window, a losing record, an out-of-sample slice that loses badly, or a loss once costs double. Every strategy runs the gauntlet — walk-forward analysis and parameter jitter by default, with cost stress, Monte Carlo, and regime splits alongside, scored for robustness — before it earns a paper slot. Before it can go live, those verdicts must hold, its forward paper trades must confirm its backtest, and it needs a deflated Sharpe of at least 0.90, which discounts luck from trying many variants, and a pass on one walk-forward run over recent data that was held back from all research. In paper, a strategy whose forward trades contradict its backtest, or that is clearly losing, is retired automatically. The pipeline board tells you exactly which gate stopped it. Implausibly good metrics are treated as suspicious, not impressive: a profit factor at or above the lookahead ceiling, or a Sharpe past the implausible ceiling, triggers an automatic reject because they usually signal a future-bar leak. Forven would rather disprove your darling cheaply than fund it expensively.

A note on the names

The marketing site uses simplified words for the pipeline. The app uses the real engineering names, and so do these docs:

public "screen" is the quick_screen overfitting gate
public "candidate" is the paper stage
public "gauntlet" and "live" mean what they say

Wherever a public synonym helps, we note it once and then use the real name.

The honest caveat

Forven is a research tool. Backtest and paper results are simulations of the past, are not predictive of future performance, and nothing in this documentation is financial advice. Paper is the supported mode; live/mainnet is unsupported and at your own risk. Go slow, stay in paper while you learn, and decide for yourself.

Philosophy — why the tool is built to doubt its own numbers
Everything is free — Forven has no tiers or paywall; every feature is free
Execution modes: paper vs live — paper simulation vs the unsupported live path
Going live safely — the safety machinery, and why live mainnet is unsupported

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