How it runs
Where the work happens.
Wildflower installs on your computer. Your strategy runs there, next to your broker session, and it is your machine that places your orders. The app on your phone reads back what your machine reported.
Where this stands today
Your computer runs your strategy.
Every real broker account runs on your machine. Not as an option you can switch on, and not as a plan you can pay to leave — it is how the product is built. The Wildflower agent installs on your computer, opens your broker session under your own entitlement, and places your orders from there. There is no path through our servers that can place an order on your broker account, for anyone, ever.
The one thing we do run: the demo. The Wildflower demo is a simulation — no broker, no credentials, no order that reaches a venue — and it runs in our cloud on our own data so you can try the product before you install anything. It is the only account of yours our servers execute, and it executes nothing real.
True of every account, always
- Your broker session runs under your own entitlement, the same one you would use to trade by hand.
- We never hold your money. Your funds stay with your broker throughout.
- We never place a trade for you by hand.
- Your market data is used to run your strategy and to show you your own account. It is not sold, and it is not redistributed to anyone.
On your machine
The engine sits next to your broker session.
- You connect your broker once, in the app. Those credentials are encrypted and held in your Wildflower account, because they are what lets your agent open your session and what lets the app read your balances back. We are not going to tell you we never hold them — we do, and you can remove them at any time, which ends our access with them.
- The agent opens your broker session under your own entitlement, the same entitlement you would use to trade by hand.
- Quotes and bars arrive at your machine from your broker, under your entitlement: the bars your strategy reads are stored on your own disk, next to the engine that reads them. We are not a market-data vendor and we sell nobody’s prices.
- The engine evaluates your rules where the data already is, rather than across the internet from it. That is the shortest path available to us, and it is why the engine lives on your side of the line.
What the agent does on its own
It reconnects when a session drops. It reconciles its picture of your positions against what the broker reports, and the broker’s version wins every time. It updates itself with a warm handover, so the new version takes over engine state from the old one at a safe point rather than restarting into an unknown position.
On our servers
Your account, and the record of what happened.
What we hold
- Your account, your settings and your billing.
- Your strategies, as you saved them.
- Fills, orders, positions, balances and P&L, as your broker reported them, so the app and its Activity page work on any device you sign in from.
- Commands you send from the app, on their way to your agent.
- Whether the agent is alive, so we can tell you when it is not.
Your broker’s prices
Your real account’s bars arrive at your computer from your broker under your own entitlement and they are stored there, on your disk, which is where your engine reads them.
The exception, said rather than hidden: the Wildflower demo is a simulation we run in our cloud on our own data. No broker of yours is involved in it, and nothing it does reaches a venue.
Fills, balances and P&L come from your broker’s execution reports. Those are records of your own account, and they do travel to us, because the app and its Activity page are built out of them.
This is a line in the architecture rather than a policy someone has to remember: your engine runs where your data already is. We will keep stating it with its exception attached — the demo — because a promise that quietly has one is worth less than a smaller promise that does not.
When things go wrong
What happens if the connection drops.
- Your internet drops
- Your positions are held by your broker, as they always are. The engine keeps its state on your machine and reconciles against the broker when the session returns.
- Your machine goes off
- The engine stops. Orders already resting at the broker stay where they are, under the broker’s control. Whether that is what you want is a decision you make in advance, and the settings for it are yours to set.
- The agent stops reporting
- A dead-man alert reaches you by push and email. The app shows the agent as offline. It will not hold a stale figure on screen and let you assume the thing is still running.
- Our servers have a bad day
- The engine on your machine keeps running your rules — it is not waiting on us for permission to trade. What you lose is the app view and the Activity page until we are back, and your agent forwards its record when it can reach us again. The demo, which does run on our servers, pauses with us and picks up afterwards.
Parity
The discipline that keeps the three modes in step.
One engine serves authoring, backtesting and live running. There is no separate live implementation to drift away from the tested one.
After a live session closes, Wildflower replays it through the simulator over the same data your machine received, with the same strategy version and the same engine build, and compares the two decision streams.
You see the agreement and the differences. We watch the same figure across every user, because a drop in it is the first sign that something in the machinery has moved.
What the agreement figure is not
It is a measure of whether the software did the same thing twice over the same inputs. It carries no information about whether a strategy makes money, and we will never present it as though it does.
The boundaries we keep
Things Wildflower does not do.
- We never place a trade for you by hand. Not once, not for anyone, not in a support call.
- We do not introduce you to a broker, we take no commission or payment from any broker, and we do not help you open an account with one.
- We ship no strategies, no presets and no default values on anything that affects a trade.
- We do not tell you what to trade, when to trade it, or what any of your numbers should be.
- We never hold your money. Your funds stay with your broker throughout.
Trading futures carries risk. You can lose money.