A Trading Agent You Actually Own

A napkin idea, tested

Most trading ideas start as a sentence. "What if I bought when this happens and sold when that happens?" Usually the sentence stays in your head, because turning it into something you can test means writing software.

Vibe-Trading, from the Data Intelligence Lab at the University of Hong Kong, closes that gap. You describe the idea in plain language. An AI agent writes the strategy and then backtests it, replaying your idea against historical market data to see how it would have behaved. It covers stocks in the US, Canada, the UK, India, Korea, Hong Kong and mainland China, plus crypto, futures and currencies.

It's free and open-source, and it clearly struck a nerve: around 35.4k people have starred it on GitHub. The team keeps shipping too, most recently adding verifiable "run cards", a record of each test you can check.

The honest small print

You bring your own AI provider key, and some data sources are paid or need a token. Setting it up is a job for a technical friend, not a Sunday afternoon. A good backtest tells you about the past, not the future. And the team says the X account VibeTrading_HKU and a related crypto token are not theirs, so be careful.

Words worth knowing

• Backtest: running a strategy on old data to see how it would have done. A rehearsal, not a prediction.
• Open-source (MIT license): the code is public and you can use it, even commercially, without paying.
• API key: a personal password that lets a tool use an AI service, billed to your account.

Worth a thought

Even if you never trade, notice the pattern: a sentence becomes a working experiment. Which "what if" in your business would you test if testing were this easy?