What is Vike Trader?

Three surfaces over one execution core, fourteen venue bridges, a backtester that shares its fill model with paper trading, and a safety model in which every venue starts on paper.

Vike Trader is a trading platform written in Rust. It ships as three surfaces over one core: a desktop GUI with native charts, a headless daemon for unattended live trading, and a CLI that is also an MCP server for AI agents. Free. Source-available under FSL-1.1; every release becomes Apache-2.0 two years on. Every venue connection starts on paper.

The three surfaces

Surface	Binary	What it is for
Desktop GUI	`vike-desktop`	egui/wgpu charts over a live feed, order entry, the Studio, venue and credential management. Its default `fat` build carries the local trading core and every venue bridge the mount wires by default — the IBKR, Polymarket and FXCM arms each need their own cargo feature; a `thin` build is the observe-only client.
Headless daemon	`vike-tradehub`	Runs a strategy from a TOML profile with no GUI, survives an SSH disconnect, and serves an authenticated observe/control socket that the CLI, the REPL and agents talk to.
CLI / MCP	`vike-cli`	`backtest` / `sweep` / `walkforward` against a data service, an interactive `trade` REPL over a running node, and `mcp` — a stdio MCP server for any MCP client.

Two of them — vike-desktop and vike-tradehub — are composition roots over the execution core. vike-cli is deliberately not: its manifest links only the light client crates, no concrete backend, no vike-backtest, no engine crate. A backtest runs inside vike-datahub, the compute-to-data server that sits next to the history and returns only the report; trade and mcp are wire clients to a running vike-tradehub node. Where each of these runs, and what it needs, is on Where it runs.

A Rhai strategy is the same code in a backtest and on the daemon, by decision rather than accident: the daemon compiles a script through vike-script's one engine builder and registers no host function of its own — crates/vike-tradehub/src/config.rs's resolve_script states both halves. What does not carry over is user_data/indicators/: vike-tradehub never calls install_user_indicators, so a user indicator that resolves under backtest is a function-not-found on the daemon. Compiled strategies are a per-name question instead: the registry's LIVE_CAPABLE ledger records which names would resolve on the daemon and then never trade, with a written reason for each (a funding reader, for one, because live bars carry no funding series).

Fourteen venue bridges

Every venue adapter implements one ExecutionClient contract: submit and cancel are required, everything else has a default, and no order may silently vanish — a dead venue path must synthesize a terminal rejection. The canonical roster is vike_model::VENUES (crates/vike-model/src/venues.rs): binance, bybit, okx, deribit, oanda, ig, fxcm, dukascopy, polymarket, ibkr, ctrader, alpaca, aster, hyperliquid.

That roster is a contract, not a list. Every per-venue capability table's completeness test iterates it and asserts a declared row for each entry, so adding a venue fails every table's tests until its rows land — time-in-force, fees, margin support and the rest are classified or the build is red. The generated pages under Venues are rendered from those same tables.

A backtester you can trust next to live

Backtest fills and paper-exchange fills come from one shared crate, vike-fills: one definition of what a fill costs, when it happens and at what price, extracted verbatim from the backtester so that a paper executor mounted on a live feed charges exactly what the simulator charges. Costs ([engine]), risk ([risk]) and the data slice ride in one run-profile TOML whether you run a single backtest, a parameter sweep or an anchored walk-forward — the sweep and walk-forward verbs ship the profile text verbatim so the server honours the whole [engine] surface, not a subset. Start with Quickstart: first backtest.

Live reconciliation

A live session can run the reconciliation engine (VIKE_RECONCILE=1): on a schedule, and on reconnect for the venues wired for it, it fetches the venue's own order, fill and position reports, diffs them against local state, and resolves divergences under an explicit policy (VIKE_RECONCILE_POLICY — hybrid, synthesize, quarantine or external-quarantine). Unset, it is off and the process is byte-identical to one that never had it. The kinds and the policies are documented under Reconciliation.

A measured latency budget

The core event hop is covered by a latency gate that runs in CI on a dedicated quiet runner with reserved cores: crates/vike-core/tests/runtime_latency.rs's baseline harness gates the p99 core-hop tail against P99_BUDGET_NS, ten microseconds. It is an assertion on a measured number, and it is honestly advisory: main carries no required status checks, so a red gate reports rather than blocks, and merging past one is a human decision.

Paper by default

Two independent gates sit in front of live trading, and both default to closed:

Absent credentials are the live gate. A venue whose keys are not in the credential store (<project>/settings/secrets.env) mounts as paper. There is no flag that arms a venue without keys.
A per-venue arming ceiling. policy.venues.<venue> in <project>/settings/policy.toml (paper / demo / live, default paper) is read before the credential read and can only ever refuse — vike_config::VenueMode::cap takes the minimum. A box with no [venues] table mounts everything paper, whatever the credential store holds.

Risk and arming carries the whole model; Arm one venue for demo is the first time you open either gate.

Licence

Free. Source-available under FSL-1.1; every release becomes Apache-2.0 two years on. The conversion is per version and rolling — each release starts its own two-year clock, and the Apache-2.0 grant is irrevocable. Paid support and consulting on Vike Trader are explicitly permitted; what the licence blocks is selling Vike Trader itself as a competing product or hosted service. LICENSE.md is the whole grant, including the future-licence clause.