Skip to main content

Configuration

No keys needed to explore

Want to see TradeFlow work before signing up for anything? Run make demo — it runs the whole pipeline (backtest + walk-forward) on synthetic data, offline.

Credentials live in a .env file, which is gitignored so your keys are never committed. Create it from the template:

cp .env.example .env
.env
APCA_API_KEY_ID=<your key id>
APCA_API_SECRET_KEY=<your secret>

# Keep this true until you are absolutely sure you want to trade real money.
PAPER_TRADE=true

Get paper keys from the Alpaca dashboard under Paper Account → API Keys.

Where settings come from​

Every credential is resolved through one place (tradeflow/settings.py) in a fixed order, so there's never any ambiguity:

  1. Environment variables — the standard, 12-factor way (export APCA_API_KEY_ID=…).
  2. .env in the project root — loaded automatically; real environment variables already set always win.

The same chain resolves the optional LLM provider keys for the research agent (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY, OLLAMA_BASE_URL) — set them in .env or export them, whichever you prefer.

Paper vs. live​

PAPER_TRADE selects the Alpaca endpoint. Leave it True while learning — every live run then trades against the paper account with no real money at risk.

Run-time options​

Everything else (symbols, dates, capital, strategy, scanner) is passed per run on the command line or via Make variables — nothing else needs editing:

make backtest SYMBOLS=AAPL,MSFT START=2024-06-01 END=2024-09-01 CAPITAL=50000

See the individual workflow pages for the full option list.