What it does OpenAlice is a self-hosted AI trading agent for equities, crypto, commodities, forex, and macro. It runs two processes on your machine: an “Alice” process that handles research, analysis, and AI-driven decisions, and a separate “UTA” process that actually holds your broker credentials and executes trades. The AI never sees your keys. Every order gets staged, committed with a message, and pushed through a guard pipeline before execution — and you must explicitly approve each trade.

The interesting bit The “Trading-as-Git” workflow is the standout idea. Orders live in a staged state with commit hashes, full history is reviewable, and guards act like ESLint for your portfolio — catching oversized positions, cooldown violations, or off-list symbols before they hit the market. The architecture is explicitly designed to split apart: keep the credential-holding UTA service on a trusted home device while Alice lives on a VPS, like a hardware wallet for trading.

Key highlights

• Multi-broker unification — CCXT, Alpaca, Interactive Brokers, and Longbridge fold into “Unified Trading Accounts” with per-account guard rules and isolated histories
• Research stack built in — TypeScript-native OpenBB engine for cross-asset market data, fundamental equity research, technical indicators, and RSS news archiving
• Workspace-native AI — Per-task git repos with persistent terminal sessions running claude, codex, or shell, wired via MCP servers rather than protocol shims
• Runtime provider switching — Claude (Agent SDK with OAuth) or Vercel AI SDK (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) without restart
• Self-modification mode — “Evolution mode” escalates permissions to full Bash access, letting the agent rewrite its own code

Caveats

• Explicitly experimental — the README warns against live trading with real funds; many interfaces are incomplete and subject to breaking changes
• Automation’s last mile is unfinished — scheduling (cron, heartbeat) works, but wiring scheduled events into workspace-resident execution is still being rebuilt; heartbeat ticks currently run AI checks without guaranteed user-facing delivery
• Fundamental research depth varies — deepest for equities, other asset classes are expanding

Verdict Worth a look if you want to experiment with AI-driven trading without surrendering broker credentials to a cloud service, and you have the patience for actively maintained alpha software. Avoid if you need turnkey automation or are unwilling to read commit hashes before your orders execute.