Concepts
Concept pages explain how AlphaSwarm works and why it's built that way. They are reading material, not checklists — when you need to do something, use How-to; when you need an exact contract, use Reference.
Every concept page opens with a plain-English paragraph before going technical, so skimming first paragraphs is a legitimate way to learn the platform.
Pick a starting point
| If you want to understand… | Start with |
|---|---|
| The whole system at a glance | Architecture, then Flows |
| How strategies are researched and tested | Analysis framework, Backtest engines |
| How a strategy earns the right to trade real money | Strategy lifecycle, Promotion evidence, Approval queues |
| Where market data comes from and how it flows | Market-data vendors, Streaming governance |
| Production Dagster jobs, schedules, and instance config | Dagster operations |
| Interactive Dagster pipeline sandbox isolation | Dagster sandbox |
| The AI agents and how they're kept safe | Agents, Multi-agent patterns, Agentic development |
| The knowledge base and graph | Knowledge base, Graph Data Pillar |
| Reinforcement learning | RL framework, RL lifecycle gates |
| Logins, permissions, and tenant isolation | Identity, Multi-tenancy, Credentials |
| Trading operations and monitoring | Paper trading, Observability, Six-clock latency |
| The services that make up a deployment | Services catalog |
Section map
- Platform — the domain model, core types, registries, and environment topology that everything else builds on.
- Data plane — vendors, streaming, catalogs, production Dagster operations, the interactive Dagster sandbox, the knowledge base, graph, RAG, and the (in-development) semantic layer.
- Strategy & ML — analysis framework, ML lifecycle, backtesting engines, and the strategy lifecycle including promotion.
- Reinforcement learning — the RL lab, policy backbones, evaluation, and lifecycle gates.
- Agentic — agent taxonomy, crews, orchestration, and the agentic development security posture.
- Trading + operations — paper/live sessions, approval queues, observability.
- Identity + tenancy — authentication, credentials, multi-tenant isolation, workload identity.
- Infrastructure — Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, and the per-service catalog.
New to the platform entirely? Read What is AlphaSwarm? first.