Request: Permission to self‑host AI‑Trader for experimental/research purposes

Subject: Permission Request: Self-hosting AI-Trader for Experimental / Research Use

To: [HKUDS Team / AI-Trader Maintainers – via GitHub Issue or Email]

Dear HKUDS / AI-Trader Maintainers,

I hope you are doing well. I recently discovered your AI-Trader project and am thoroughly impressed by the concept of an agent-native trading platform. I am writing to formally request your permission to self-host the platform locally for non-commercial, experimental research purposes.

To give you some context on who I am: I’m Muhammad Usman, a systematic trading researcher. Over the past two years, I have built end-to-end automated trading infrastructure across crypto, forex, and US equities—covering data ingestion, multi-agent signal combination, risk layering, and execution via Interactive Brokers, with a Telegram-based approval workflow for per-item confirmation.

I believe in rigorous validation, which is why I openly retire strategies that don't hold up. I have killed a moving-average crypto system (which showed profit factors of only 0.42–0.82), retired an RSI trend strategy after its edge flipped out-of-sample, and abandoned a multi-agent forex consensus system upon discovering a lookahead bias in my own code—where the backtest looked acceptable before proper validation and did not survive it.

My current equity system is the first to survive the process, carrying a small but precisely measured edge of roughly 1.7% annualised over its universe, surviving realistic transaction costs and proving consistent across two independently constructed universes. I spent considerable effort trying to prove it wrong—testing against benchmarks, alternative universes, and every filter in the system. In fact, two of those filters turned out to be reducing returns and were removed on the evidence.

With a background in software engineering and release management, I treat my work with version-controlled decisions, documented reasoning, and transparent records—including my mistakes. Everything I have done to date remains paper-traded; I have a validated method and working infrastructure, not a track record to sell.

Given this context, I would greatly appreciate the chance to experiment with AI-Trader in my own environment to explore how agent-native infrastructure can complement my existing setup. I assure you this use would be strictly experimental, non-commercial, and solely for my personal research. I would also be happy to share any feedback, bug reports, or validation notes with your team.

Could you please let me know if you are open to granting this permission, and if so, whether you have any specific conditions I should follow (e.g., attribution, non-distribution clauses)?

Thank you for your time and for sharing such an innovative project with the community.

Best regards, Muhammad Usman Systematic Trading Research