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Forven is a free, open-source, self-hosted quant research lab for retail quant traders. You build a trading idea, prove or disprove it on out-of-sample data, kill what doesn't survive, and promote only what does. You run it on your own machine — clone the repository and start it — and your strategies, data, and keys never leave it.

This is the documentation landing page. If you are new, read How Forven works for the big picture, then Install and follow the Quickstart. If you already have it running, the pipeline and the gauntlet are the two concepts worth understanding first — and What's new lists recent changes.

The core idea

Most retail strategies look good on the data they were tuned on and fall apart everywhere else. Forven's answer is one opinionated process: build → test → kill → promote. A strategy advances only when its evidence survives a battery of out-of-sample and robustness checks. The process is the product.

Every strategy moves through the same stages, each behind a gate:

quick_screen → gauntlet → paper → live_graduated

• quick_screen — cheap triage that catches overfitting and too-good-to-be-true metrics before any expensive testing. The public site calls this stage "screen."
• gauntlet — the robustness battery: walk-forward analysis and parameter jitter by default, with cost stress, Monte Carlo, and regime splits alongside.
• paper — forward trading on the live market feed with simulated fills and no capital at risk. The public site calls a strategy at this stage a "candidate." Paper is the supported way to run Forven.
• live_graduated — the real-order code path, behind the strictest gate and a typed GO LIVE confirmation. Live / mainnet is not a supported feature; paper is where Forven stops by default.

Strategies that aren't ready to be certified wait in research_only; strategies that stop earning their place end up archived or rejected. See the pipeline for what each stage tests and how to see why a strategy is where it is.

Three ways to work

• By hand. Design a strategy from indicators in the Strategy Creator — or from a plain-English description, or in code — backtest it, and send it into the pipeline. No AI key needed.
• With Forven's agents. Six optional agents, coordinated by the brain, research hypotheses in Crucibles, write and test strategies, and keep the pipeline moving on their own. They run on your own model provider keys, and they cannot place trades.
• With your own AI client. Connect Claude, Codex, Cursor, or any MCP client to the MCP server, and it can write, backtest, validate, and promote strategies through the same gates.

Whichever you use, the gates don't change.

How the pieces fit

• The local stack — a FastAPI backend (port 8003) that also hosts the scheduler, the agent and brain loops, and the data/risk daemon; a web UI (port 5173); SQLite for state; and a Parquet data lake for market data. Your state lives under FORVEN_HOME (defaults to ~/.forven).
• One execution kernel — the same code turns signals into positions in the backtest, in paper, and in live, so a strategy is validated on exactly the logic that runs it forward.
• The research loop — an autonomous background loop that proposes hypotheses, develops candidate strategies, runs them through the gauntlet, and retires losers. You set how much it runs with the system mode and the throughput preset.

For the full architecture, read How Forven works.

Where you'll spend your time

• Dashboard (/) — the control strip, equity, the leaderboard, the funnel, and alerts.
• Strategy Creator (/strategy-creator) — build and preview strategies, then send them to The Forge.
• Manual Backtest (/backtest/new) — run any strategy against history with your own settings.
• The Forge (/lab) — every strategy in the pipeline: optimize it, run the gauntlet, read its verdict and promotion checklist.
• Crucibles (/hypotheses) — the research hypotheses and their evidence.
• Paper Trades and Risk — forward results, and every safety control in one place.
• Pipeline, Diagnostics, and Agents — why strategies are where they are, whether the system is healthy, and what the AI layer is doing.

Free and open source

Forven is free and open source under AGPL-3.0-or-later. There is no account, no sign-up, no license key, no paywall, and no tiers — every feature is yours the moment you clone and run it. That includes the full local lab, the research loop, paper trading, the risk controls, and the AI agent layer (which runs on your own model provider keys — bring your own key, never resold). See Everything is free.

A note on safety

Forven is a research tool. Backtest and paper results describe the past and are not predictive of future performance. Any numbers you see in this documentation are illustrative. Nothing here is financial advice.

The supported way to run Forven is paper trading: simulated fills on live market data, with no order ever leaving your machine. There is no supported live / mainnet (real-money) path — execution defaults to paper, the in-app switch can't turn live on, and wiring real exchange keys to trade live is unsupported and entirely at your own risk. You cannot skip paper trading.

What Forven is not

Forven is not a signal service, not copy trading, and not a promise of profit. It is a process tool for people who want proof before conviction.

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
• Quickstart — from install to your first paper strategy
• What's new — recent changes, month by month