What this desk covers
FreqDesk is a set of reading notes on open-source trading bots — the programs that execute strategies on exchanges automatically, on your own machine. The desk exists for one reason: the documentation for these tools is scattered across GitHub wikis, chat archives and forum threads, and a working engineer should not need ten tabs to answer a basic question.
Everything here is about self-hosted, open-source software: freqtrade, hummingbot, jesse, octobot and their neighbours. No hosted services, no signal subscriptions, no managed accounts. If a program cannot be run and audited on your own hardware, it is out of scope for this desk.
The tools this desk tracks
| Tool | Language | Core idea | Where the docs live |
|---|---|---|---|
| freqtrade | Python | Strategy bot for spot and futures, with a large strategy ecosystem | GitHub wiki + docs site |
| hummingbot | Python | Market-making and cross-exchange arbitrage | Official docs site |
| jesse | Python | Research-first framework with a clean strategy API | Docs site + GitHub |
| octobot | Python | Configurable bot with a web interface | Docs site |
The desk leans toward freqtrade as a reference implementation: it is the most widely deployed, its strategy format is the most copied, and its history on GitHub is long enough to answer questions by reading old issues.
How to read these notes
- The setup path — what installing freqtrade actually involves, step by step, including the parts the quickstart skips.
- Strategy notes — how strategies are structured, where the well-known ones come from, and how to compare them without fooling yourself.
- The bot landscape — freqtrade against hummingbot and jesse, tool by tool, with the honest trade-offs.
- The primer — if bots are new, start here: what a bot can and cannot do for an account.
- The AI angle — where language models genuinely fit into a trading stack, and where the marketing runs ahead of the code.
- Backtesting notes — how to read a backtest without trusting it too much.
Primary sources
Every claim on this desk traces to the project's own documentation, its repository, or public exchanges of its maintainers. Where something is contested or version-dependent, the note says so. Where a number matters, the note shows how to recompute it from public data. Corrections are read weekly and applied with a dated changelog entry on the relevant page.