NO FREE ALPHA

No free alpha. Free syllabus though.

NO FREE ALPHA is a source-attributed interactive quant-finance university. It reorganizes four public GitHub repositories into a curriculum, Model Zoo, Quant Stack, research pipeline, failure-mode cemetery, roadmap, and controlled numerical labs.

This repository contains the working product and the ingestion system behind it. Repository notebooks and scripts are parsed structurally and never executed.

What works

• Locked clones, recursive inventories, license discovery, and provenance manifests for all four sources.
• Safe Markdown, notebook, Python AST, and PDF metadata extraction.
• 557 normalized source records plus 621 unique Awesome Quant links.
• Twenty seed lessons, seven model cards, eight pipeline stages, six backtest autopsies, and ten quests.
• Twelve controlled labs spanning diffusion, option pricing, implied volatility, stochastic volatility, jumps, filtering, portfolio construction, and risk.
• Independent Python quant engine with numerical tests and a FastAPI calculation boundary.
• Responsive terminal UI, global search, roadmap assessment, source ledger, and legal routes.

Architecture

• app/ — strict TypeScript web product.
• apps/api/ — FastAPI boundary and Alembic migration baseline.
• packages/quant_engine/ — independent numerical implementations.
• scripts/ — clone, inventory, extract, normalize, validate, seed, and report commands.
• data/ — registry, provenance, inventories, normalized artifacts, fixtures, and local database output.
• source-repositories/ — ignored, reproducible source clones.
• docs/ — product, architecture, ingestion, coverage, license, deployment, and progress documentation.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 22.13 or newer
• pnpm 11
• Python 3.12 or newer
• Git
• Docker Desktop only when running PostgreSQL, Redis, and the API container

Setup

cp .env.example .env
pnpm install
docker compose up -d
python -m pip install -r apps/api/requirements.txt

PowerShell equivalent for the first command:

Copy-Item .env.example .env

No paid API or hosted credential is required.

Ingestion

python scripts/clone_sources.py
python scripts/inventory_sources.py
python scripts/extract_all.py
python scripts/normalize_content.py
python scripts/validate_provenance.py
python scripts/generate_reports.py
python scripts/seed_database.py

Use --repo <canonical-id> for a single clone and --refresh to fast-forward clean clones. The clone command refuses to refresh a working tree with local changes.

Development

pnpm dev

The web app runs at http://localhost:3000. The containerized API runs at http://localhost:8000, with health at /api/v1/health and OpenAPI at /docs.

Testing and validation

python -m unittest packages.quant_engine.tests.test_quant_engine -v
pnpm lint
pnpm exec tsc --noEmit
pnpm build
pnpm test
python scripts/validate_provenance.py

Numerical tests cover a Black–Scholes reference value, put–call parity, implied-volatility inversion, Monte Carlo error tolerance, reproducibility, positivity, and input boundaries.

Deployment

Build the web surface with pnpm build and deploy through the configured Sites workflow or another compatible host. Deploy the API container separately, run the Alembic migration against managed PostgreSQL, and point the web runtime at NEXT_PUBLIC_API_BASE_URL.

Source refreshes produce review artifacts only; they never publish automatically.

Licensing and attribution

See ATTRIBUTION.md, LICENSE-COMPLIANCE.md, and docs/licenses.md. The Financial Models–Numerical Methods source is detected as AGPL-3.0 and remains isolated; product numerical code is independently implemented.

Known limitations

• Authenticated progress, admin review UI, public profiles, semantic search, subscriptions, and LLM augmentation remain disabled.
• Normalized machine records stay human-review-required; only curated seed content is presented as published.
• One upstream filename is invalid on Windows and is inventoried through GitHub’s locked tree API.

Educational use only. Not investment advice. No affiliation or endorsement is implied.