Start where you are.
First trade or ten-thousandth, a free afternoon or a full-time job: Alpha keeps the rules in your hands and does the watching with you.
Learn on a market that cannot cost you.
Futures move fast and use leverage. The way to get comfortable is to practise until nothing on the screen surprises you.
- Practise with simulated money
- Alpha opens on simulated accounts with $50,000 of practice equity. Prices, prints and fills come from its own simulated market, and every screen says SIM.
- Ask in plain words
- “What is NQ doing right now?” gets an answer with the numbers behind it: where price sits against the day’s range, who is pushing, and how busy the book is.
- Size by risk, not by guesswork
- “How many NQ for $300 with a 12-tick stop?” The Agent works it out from the contract’s tick value, so a position starts from what you are willing to lose.
- Replay a session at your pace
- Pick a moment from earlier in the day and replay it at half speed or 32×, with its own replay account, until the buttons feel ordinary.
A busy day? Hand the Agent the shift.
You set the limits once. Inside them, the Agent can trade without stopping to ask, or a strategy you validated can run on its own, while you get on with your day.
Every order still meets the same core: your daily loss limit, your position limits, your kill switch. When the grant’s time is up, it ends. You can stop it from the island at any moment.
Sound familiar?
“I’d stare at a chart for hours and still not take the trade.”
Hours at the screen wear anyone down. Doubt creeps in after a loss, and a good setup goes by while you are still deciding. That is chart paralysis.
Rules are the answer, and software keeps them better than willpower. The Agent does not get tired, chase a loss or freeze after a bad trade. It follows the strategy and the limits you gave it, the same way every time.
Following rules consistently is not a promise of profit. A strategy can lose, and automation can lose faster. Results on simulated accounts do not predict live results.
Describe it. Alpha drafts it.
You do not need to write code to make Alpha your own. Tell the Agent what you want, read what it drafts, and decide.
- Strategies
- Describe the idea; the Agent drafts it in Strata, Alpha’s strategy language, for you to read, backtest and validate before it ever runs.
- Indicators
- Ask for an indicator, such as a 20-bar z-score, and preview it on the chart before you keep it.
- Research cards
- Correlations, return distributions and volatility cones from your own markets and trades, each reproducible from its inputs.
- Your screen
- Ask it to open a page or change how a chart looks; display changes come with a restore point.
Coming from stocks?
Alpha trades futures today. If you follow the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq-100, the Micro E-mini contracts (MES and MNQ) track the same indexes at a tenth of the size of the standard ones, and you can practise both in Alpha’s simulator.
US stocks and real options data are planned through a licensed data vendor; there is no date yet. Futures are leveraged: a small move in the index can be a large move in your account. Practise first, and never trade money you cannot afford to lose.
Markets and data, with their statusConfidence comes from limits.
Choose a daily loss limit and what happens when it is reached. Watch a simulated day play out against each choice.
Session open.
A simulated day on a simulated account. In Alpha the same rule is enforced by the core for every order: clicks, hotkeys, strategies and the Agent.
Questions
I have never traded. Is Alpha for me?
It can be, if you start on the simulator. Alpha is built for futures, which are leveraged and risky. Practise on simulated accounts, read the guides, set a daily loss limit, and never trade money you cannot afford to lose.
Can the Agent trade my real money while I am at work?
Not today. Alpha lets the Agent trade on its own only on simulated accounts. It refuses agent autonomy on a live account until live broker routes, safety checks and legal review are complete.
Does the Agent predict the market?
No. It reads prices, your accounts and the calendar, and follows the strategy and limits you give it. Its research describes history; Alpha labels every card as not a forecast.
Does it trade around the clock?
It trades for the hours you grant, while Alpha is running. Futures trade nearly around the clock on weekdays; a grant ends when its time is up, or sooner if you stop it.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. Describe a strategy, an indicator or a research question in plain words, and the Agent drafts it for you to read and test. If you do code, custom indicators can be written in JavaScript, Python, C, Rust or WebAssembly.
Can I use it for a prop-firm evaluation?
Not yet: Alpha does not connect to live or funded accounts. When it does, check your firm’s rules first; many restrict automated or AI-assisted trading.
Tell us where you are starting from: learning, short on time, or building your own. It shapes who sees Alpha first.