‘The OpenAI of trading’: inside the lab that wants an AI to run the book
Foresight Research says its flagship model, Oracle, reads markets and news and trades without a human in the loop. It has yet to show the market its record
Every few years a company announces that it has built the machine that will replace the trader. Most are quietly forgotten. Foresight Research, a research lab founded this year, is the latest to make the claim, and it is making it with unusual confidence.
The firm calls itself an AI trading research lab and says its aim is to be for trading what the frontier labs have become for language. Its flagship model, Oracle, is described as a system that takes in market data and real-time news, decides, and executes, with no human in the loop.
“A model that trades, not a tool that helps a trader,” is how Albert Ludemann, the firm's founder, puts it. “Everything goes in and one decision comes out.”
What sets the company apart from the usual run of fintech launches is the way it talks about evidence. It says Oracle is tested after costs before it trades, publishes the method behind its research notes, and runs a public terminal that replays the model's decisions session by session for anyone to watch.
What it has not yet done is show the market a track record. Foresight Research is privately held and founder-led. It has not disclosed assets under management, outside investors or audited returns, and it says it offers no financial service to the public at this stage. The firm did not supply independently verified performance figures for this article.
“The demonstration is never the interesting part,” said Dr. Katrin Vogel, who studies automation in financial markets. “Three bad quarters are the interesting part. Then we will know.”
Mr. Ludemann says that is the test he wants. The firm's stated plan is to let the record speak before it takes on clients. If it does, a lab with a handful of people will have done what the largest firms in finance have been promising for a decade.
