The internet keeps a viral list of tools that promise an edge. We studied it. 4 run on this desk today, 10 were refused with reasons, 1 waits on the shelf. Stars measure fame, not skill — the model with 32,000 of them last went 59 for 95 on its Thai exam.
KronosON THIS DESK
shiyu-coder/Kronos · Foundation model for candlesticks — 45 exchanges, AAAI 2026
Runs on this desk zero-shot over SET names — and gets graded in public. Its latest exam came back 59 for 95 on direction. We keep running it because the grading is the product, not the forecast.
WHERE IT RUNS → /forecastvectorbtON THIS DESK
polakowo/vectorbt · Vectorized backtesting — thousands of variants in seconds
Powers the Strategy Lab's parameter sweeps — the full EMA/RSI/Bollinger grid, Sharpe heatmaps included. Speed is honest work; any claim it produces still has to face the 26-year ledger.
WHERE IT RUNS → /labsBacktraderON THIS DESK
mementum/backtrader · Event-driven backtesting with realistic order mechanics
Its fill engine — slippage, volume caps, stop and bracket orders — is what makes our simulator's fills realistic instead of flattering. A paper trade that fills perfectly teaches a lie.
WHERE IT RUNS → /simulatePolymarket APION THIS DESK
Polymarket/gamma-api · Read-only odds from the largest real-money prediction market
Real-money odds on the Fed and the recession — the price of belief, read every 15 minutes with source and age attached. We display prices; we never trade them.
WHERE IT RUNS → /eventsTradingAgentsREFUSED
TauricResearch/TradingAgents · Multi-agent LLM framework — AI personas debate trades
Five AI personas debating produce confident prose, not a measurable edge. An opinion you cannot grade is not a signal — our web traces measured correlations instead, and our one language surface (Ask Non) answers questions, not markets.
FinRLREFUSED
AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRL · Deep reinforcement learning for trading
Reinforcement learning on a few thousand noisy bars memorizes the past and calls it policy. Ruled out once in our modeling roadmap; the grade Kronos just earned is a reminder of why the bar is high.
FreqtradeREFUSED
freqtrade/freqtrade · Crypto trading bot — build, backtest, deploy
An execution engine for a game this desk teaches you not to play. A live exchange key in a beginner's hands is risk without evidence — the simulator teaches the same lessons with zero blast radius.
HummingbotREFUSED
hummingbot/hummingbot · Automated market making and arbitrage
Market-making spread is rent collected for carrying inventory risk against faster players. A saver's edge is patience, not latency — this is someone else's business, professionally.
CCXTSHELVED
ccxt/ccxt · One API for 100+ crypto exchanges
Good engineering with no current job here: we read crypto prices from Yahoo and trade on no exchange. The day this desk needs deeper crypto OHLCV, it is a data dependency — not before.
NautilusTraderREFUSED
nautechsystems/nautilus_trader · Institutional-grade algorithmic trading platform
Sub-millisecond latency solves a problem nobody on this desk has. Institutional plumbing without an institutional edge is cosplay — the costume is expensive and the market does not care.
OpenAliceREFUSED
openalice (AGPL) · "Your one-person Wall Street" — an AI agent that trades for you
The sales pitch is the tell: an agent that reliably made money would not need a viral reel promising it. Full-spectrum autonomous execution across five asset classes is five ways to lose money unattended — and the accountability stays yours.
FinceptTerminalREFUSED
Fincept-Corporation/FinceptTerminal · Open-source Bloomberg — 100+ sources, 37 investor-framework agents
Its one good idea — the great investors' frameworks as lenses on a stock — already lives here as the Theory Atlas and the consensus verdict, with tests. The other 36 agents are decoration, and a desktop terminal is the wrong body for a phone-first desk.
AutoHedgeREFUSED
The-Swarm-Corporation/AutoHedge · "Build your autonomous hedge fund in minutes" — agent swarm on Solana
Two contributors, zero human involvement, real execution. "Zero human involvement" is the bug being sold as the feature — a hedge fund is a liability structure and a risk desk, not a prompt.
Vibe TradingREFUSED
vibe-trading · 29 AI agent teams debate a plain-English strategy, export to TradingView
"Build and sell quantitative strategies without a quant team" — the product is selling unvalidated strategies, not trading them. Twenty-nine debaters converge on confident consensus, and consensus without a graded track record is the exact thing this desk was built to refuse.
LumibotREFUSED
Lumiwealth/lumibot · Build, backtest and deploy strategies to brokers
A thinner backtesting engine with a live broker attached. We already carry the better half of that sentence — and the desk does not attach brokers to beginners.
triage 2026-08-03 · a tool earns its place by being measurable here, not famous elsewhere