Press one button.
The node does the rest.

The walkthrough

Five steps, one hour

Each step tells you exactly what to click and what you should see before moving on.

1. STEP 01

   Install and open it

   Pick the build for your machine. All of them are self-contained — no Python, no dependencies, nothing else to install.

   • debUbuntu / Debian: install the .deb, then launch AlphaNode from the applications menu.
   • AppImageAny Linux: make the file executable and double-click it.
   • exeWindows: run the installer, launch from the Start menu.
   • dockerServers: skip the window entirely — docker-compose up -d and jump to step 5.

   A single window opens: settings on the left, live status and charts on the right. It follows your OS light/dark theme.

   Your activation key. The node mines without one — but every formula it finds stays sealed: its numbers show on the leaderboard, while the formula itself, its signals, the PDF report, Serve and the forward track wait for the key. Buy an activation (249 USDT, and it is also your first 30 days), press Activate in the header (on the Advanced screen: Activate node above the leaderboard), paste the key once, and the library opens on this machine. Mining first and activating later is fine — nothing found is lost.

2. STEP 02

   Press ▶ Start node — and only that

   The app opens in Simple mode: one accented button and a single choice — Power (Quiet / Balanced / Turbo), how much of the machine the miner may use. It runs at low priority either way, so your computer stays responsive. The first launch also greets you with a three-line reassurance card; its ▶ Start mining button and the header's ▶ Start node do the same thing.

   AlphaNode Advanced ■  Stop ▶  Start node ← press this

   power — the only knob

   Quiet Balanced Turbo

   status

   state: mining — round 3

   formulas explored: 41 208

   library: 17 alphas · survives restarts

   12:06 ★ new best: fitness +1.84

   illustration — the real window, simplified · numbers are simulated

   That's it. The node now mines in rounds: breed a population of formula trees, score every one through the fee-charging simulator, keep the champions, repeat — forever, until you press ■ Stop. Your search is yours alone: each install mints a unique node ID that seeds its own trajectory through formula space, so no two nodes mine the same library. The full control room — every setting, the portfolio builder, all analytics columns — waits behind the Advanced button for later.

3. STEP 03

   Read the leaderboard — two numbers matter

   Within the first rounds — minutes to an hour, depending on the CPU share — rows start appearing in the leaderboard. Each row is one mined formula. Two columns tell the story:

   fitness is the honest score: the formula's Sharpe on the years the search was allowed to see, taking the weaker of two separate periods — a champion has to be good in both, not lucky in one.

   TEST is the referee: the most recent slice of history the search has never seen. It is read-only — good, bad, or ugly, it's the closest thing to the future you can get from the past. Negative TEST rows stay on the board on purpose: that's what honest results look like.

   fitness	test oos	formula
   +2.49	+0.69	cs_demean(cs_rank(ts_zscore:197(dvol)))
   +2.31	+0.49	cs_zscore(ts_delta:12(ema:132(range)))
   +2.12	−0.90	cs_zscore(cs_demean(cs_scale(logret)))

   illustrative · simulated — double-click any row to open it (step 04)

   Column headers sort on click. Sort by TEST and the app will warn you: that's cherry-picking — the top of a TEST-sorted list is always inflated by luck. The Advanced view adds more columns — drawdown, CAGR, and calm / storm Sharpe that splits TEST into quiet and turbulent markets, so you can see when a formula earns. Analysis, not selection.

4. STEP 04

   Double-click a row — meet your alpha

   A window opens with the formula's equity curve: growth of $1 on a log scale, split into the TRAIN | VAL | TEST zones, against a plain buy-&-hold basket. The TEST zone is the part that was never touched by the search.

   TRAIN

   VAL

   TEST

   Paper Trade — build bundle Download signals (CSV) PDF report Passport ← start here

   illustration — solid line: the alpha · dashed: buy & hold · curves are simulated

   Press Passport first. It draws the formula as a tree, explains it step by step in plain English — “take dollar volume, ask how unusual it is against its own history, compare across assets…” — and X-rays its behavior: which inputs actually feed it, how long it holds a position, whether it's a momentum or a reversal animal. A formula you can read is a formula you can decide about.

   PDF report gives you the same story as a document you can save or send.

5. STEP 05

   Put it on the forward track — then walk away

   In the same window, press Forward track ➕. From that moment the node paper-trades the formula on live closed bars: a step is appended only when a bar actually closes, fees are charged, and the record is never rewritten. This is the only test that can't be gamed — it happens in the future.

   Serve signal (API) PDF report Passport Forward track ➕ ← the honest step

   enrolling takes one click · un-enrolling is one click too (Archive)

   Now close the laptop if you want. Next time you open AlphaNode — tomorrow, next week — the forward panel shows the paper equity that accumulated in the meantime. Give it weeks, not hours: a handful of steps is noise, a month is a signal.

6. BONUS

   Watch from the browser, grow from there

   While the node runs, it serves a live status page at http://localhost:8787 — rounds, best formulas, the forward track — auto-refreshing, from any browser on your machine.

   alphanode · localhost:8787 — status

   forward track — append-only paper steps

   alpha_2b91e4	31 steps	+1.7%
   alpha_1c90f5	25 steps	−1.9%

   When the basics feel comfortable, there's more in the box — none of it required on day one:

   • dataFresh universe: the Download fresh data from Binance button refetches the top perps by turnover. Clear the old history after — it was mined on different data.
   • portfolio▶ Build portfolio: once you have a dozen decorrelated alphas, combine them — diversification is the robust part of the edge.
   • timeframes15m / 1h / 4h / 1d: each timeframe mines into its own library with its own honest splits.
   • serverDocker & CLI: the same node headless — cli.py top --stats, forward list — with the forward track stepping itself.

Plain answers

First-day questions