An Open-Source Trading System Where You Approve Every AI-Planned Trade

Handing an AI your exchange API keys and letting it trade unsupervised is the kind of idea that sounds exciting right up until you watch it open a position you never would have taken. You want the analysis and the convenience, but you also want a say. NOFX is an open-source trading system you run on your own machine, and its central idea is that the AI proposes—you decide.

What It Does

NOFX is a self-hosted trading system with two distinct modes. Frontier is the interactive one: you pick a market, ask for entry plans, compare them on a chart, and explicitly approve the order before anything executes. Autopilot is the continuous one: you configure a trader with a model, an exchange account, and a strategy, and it reads the market, makes decisions, and routes orders through the NOFX exchange runtime while it's running. Both modes use your own configured models and exchange accounts.

The architecture is built with Vergex, with AI and data access handled through Claw402. It supports Binance USDT perpetuals, Hyperliquid, OKX, and Bitget. The whole thing runs locally—the installer pulls published Docker images, so there's no Go or Node.js setup required on your end.

Why It's Cool

• Approval is a first-class feature, not an afterthought. Generating a plan in Frontier does not submit an order. You see entry prices, stop loss, targets, leverage, position value, and estimated margin side by side, pick the plan you like, review your account and order details, and then approve execution. That's a meaningfully different posture from most "AI trading bot" projects, which tend to treat human input as an obstacle.

• Four entry types with real tradeoffs. Market, limit, weighted ladder, and TWAP plans are all on the table. The README is refreshingly honest about the limits—market entries show an estimate, and limit orders and scheduled TWAP slices may simply remain unfilled. That's the kind of detail that tells you the authors have actually used this.

• You can look before you leap. Frontier lets you browse public markets before connecting an execution account. Trading requires a matching account, but you can explore instruments and compare plans without wiring up credentials first. Good design for anyone who wants to understand the tool before trusting it with anything.

• The two modes map to two real workflows. Some people want a copilot they interrogate before every move. Others want a strategy running on rails. Keeping Frontier and Autopilot as separate modes—with the README explicitly warning that Autopilot can place trades while running—is clearer than pretending one interface covers both.

• Local-first, Docker-based setup. A one-line install script generates missing environment keys and starts the stack from published images. You open http://127.0.0.1:3000 and you're in. Self-hosting a trading system could easily mean an afternoon of dependency wrangling; this doesn't.

How to Try It

The fastest path assumes you're on Linux or macOS with Docker and Compose available—the installer will start Docker for you if needed.

1. Run the install script:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NoFxAiOS/nofx/main/install.sh | bash

1. Open http://127.0.0.1:3000 in your desktop browser.

2. Start with Frontier: choose a market (top-volume instruments, native exchange symbol search, or the Binance AI500 list), then request market, limit, ladder, and TWAP plans to compare.

3. Review the chart, account details, and order parameters, then approve execution when you're satisfied.

4. When you're ready for continuous operation, configure an Autopilot trader with a model, exchange account, and strategy—and remember it can place trades while running.

If you'd rather build from source or explore other options, the repository covers those paths too. The project is AGPL-3.0 licensed, and there's a Telegram community linked from the README, plus documentation translations in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Find it at github.com/nofxaios/nofx.

Final Thoughts

NOFX is for developers who want AI assistance with trading decisions but aren't comfortable with full autonomy—or who want both, clearly separated. The approval-gated Frontier mode is the honest headline here: it treats you as the responsible party and the model as an advisor. If you're trading on supported venues and running your own infrastructure anyway, it's worth a look. Just go in knowing the difference between the two modes, because only one of them asks permission.

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