Vike Trader
A Rust trading platform — a desktop GUI, a headless daemon and an agent-native CLI over one execution core, one backtester and 14 venue bridges.
Vike Trader is a trading platform written in Rust. One workspace builds three things — a desktop charting application, a headless live-trading daemon, and a command-line tool that doubles as a server for AI agents — and all three sit on the same execution core, the same backtester and the same 14 venue bridges.
Free. Source-available under FSL-1.1; every release becomes Apache-2.0 two years on.
Every venue starts on paper
Absent credentials are the live gate, and a per-venue ceiling in policy.toml is consulted before
them. A box with no credential store and no [venues] table mounts everything paper, whatever else
is configured. Arming is something you do deliberately, per venue — see
risk and arming.
Start here
What is Vike Trader?
The two-minute tour: the three surfaces, the venues, the backtester and the licence.
Install
Docker, Windows or Linux. One project folder, paper by default.
First backtest
No credentials: scaffold the examples, seed a tape, run a backtest and read the report.
First tutorial
A shipped strategy over real hourly bars, end to end, with every number from a real run.
Learn the platform
The concepts tree is the reference for how the thing works — the execution core and the seam every venue implements, the write-ahead journal a session replays from, the ingest lanes, the risk gate and the halt boundary. It is where a claim about behaviour is settled.
Concepts
The execution core, the venue seam, the journal, the data model, the gates. One page per event, store kind, order kind, asset class and reconciliation divergence.
Backtesting
Run profiles, the portfolio and vector engines, fill and queue models, costs, latency, sweeps and walk-forward.
Analytics
The report and its metrics, benchmarks, excursions, Monte Carlo and the anti-overfitting statistics.
Order flow
Trade classification, imbalance and runs bars, CVD, footprint, volume profile, VPIN.
Research
Studies, the run pipeline, model fitting and inference, the fit cache and the model pins.
Market making
Avellaneda–Stoikov, intensity fits, quote emission and ladders, inventory skew, and the cross-exchange maker.
Build something
Strategies
The strategy trait, the portable registry, the controller seam, and a page per shipped template with its parameters and live verdict.
Scripting
Rhai strategies and indicators: the engine, the order vocabulary, loading your own, and the limits.
Indicators
The 171 built-in indicators and 8 pair indicators, by category, each with its parameters — and the guarantee that streaming equals batch, bit for bit.
Tutorials
Worked runs, end to end. Every number on these pages was pasted from a real one.
Run it
Desktop app
Charts, the DOM ladder, the cockpit, the trade panel, the Studio IDE and the Data Manager.
Command line
vike-cli end to end: a session from init to a report, the trade REPL, how it relates to the daemon and the app, and the MCP door.
Venues
All 14 bridges: capabilities, order kinds, time in force, margin, fees, amend semantics and how each is wired.
Data providers
Where backfilled history comes from — venue-direct collectors, vendors, the archive, and store maintenance.
Guides
Task-shaped: arm a venue, record a feed, replay a session, read a report, triage a stuck order.
Troubleshooting
Symptom, cause, fix — sectioned by component, with the symptom quoted as you will meet it.
Glossary
The vocabulary the concepts pages use: ceiling, mount, lane, fold, divergence, terminal, wiring class.
Look something up
Reference
Every command-line verb, every binary in the workspace, every settings file and every environment variable.
Developer
How the workspace is gated: the CI derivation, the structure and safety gates, the supply chain, and the test tiers.
Build with AI
The agent surface — the tools an agent can call, per-client setup, and a real annotated session.
What makes it one platform
One execution core, three front ends. The desktop application, the daemon and the command-line tool are thin composition roots over the same crates. One broker-generic registry serves the backtest simulator and the live daemon alike — but not everything that backtests can mount live: the registry carries a per-name live verdict, and the daemon refuses a simulator-only name, or one whose verdict says it would resolve and then never trade, when it loads the profile. The execution client seam is the single contract every venue bridge implements.
Research and paper trading cannot disagree about a fill. The backtester's simulated fills and the live paper exchange are built from one shared crate, so a result you get in research is computed the same way the paper book computes it.
The capability tables are the documentation. Every venue page, indicator page, strategy template and reconciliation page on this site is rendered from the same tables the runtime consults, exported at each release. A page here cannot describe a capability the product does not have, because the gate in the product tree fails first.
Absent credentials are the live gate. Nothing trades because it was configured to; it trades because somebody armed that venue, in a file, on purpose.