# Welcome to Datafye!

Datafye exists to **democratize institutional-grade trading** — delivering the same caliber of market data, strategy development tools, and execution environments that have historically been the domain of elite financial firms, and making them available to every trader and investor.

By uniting **high-speed market data**, **AI-assisted strategy creation**, **realistic trading environments**, and **a global algorithm marketplace**, Datafye empowers both **developers** and **investors** to participate in a new era of algorithmic trading.

## The Datafye Pillars

Datafye’s offerings are built around three pillars that map to the natural lifecycle of an algorithmic trading strategy:

1. **Algo Foundry** — The innovation hub where algorithm developers design, test, and optimize their trading strategies.
2. **Algo Trading** — The execution environment where developers validate their strategies through paper trading and deploy them for live trading.
3. **Algo Marketplace** — The investor-facing storefront where proven algorithms are discovered, evaluated, and traded with.

These pillars are powered by a set of core components — **Data Cloud**, **Algo Container**, **Backtesting Engine**, and **Broker Connector** — which are composed differently depending on the pillar and the user’s approach, each within a dedicated **Private Cloud** environment.

* **Data Cloud**

  Serves historical and real-time market and alternative data in a low-latency, normalized manner.
* **Algo Container**

  An SDK for building microservices that host and drive developer algos, providing metrics and signals as composable building blocks for algos.
* **Backtesting Engine**

  Drives, scores and optimizes algos through high-performance, parallelized, batch-driven backtesting with state-of-the-art optimization tools and techniques.
* **Broker Connector**

  Integrates with user accounts in brokerages for paper and live trade placement and portfolio management.

### Algo Foundry

The **Algo Foundry** is where strategies take shape. Whether you're building a trading algorithm or a [signal generator](https://docs.datafye.io/concepts-and-architecture/algos-and-signal-generators), the Foundry provides the tools to develop, test, and optimize it:

* **Access** normalized, low-latency historical and real-time market and alternative data
* **Build** trading algorithms or signal generators using your own container or the Datafye **Algo Container**
* **Harness** advanced backtesting with parallelized execution, genetic algorithm-based optimization, and performance scorecarding.

Foundry composition depends on the developer’s approach:

* If a developer uses their own container for the algos, then the Foundry is comprised of the **Data Cloud** only.
* If a developer uses the Datafye **Algo Container** for the algos, then the Foundry is comprised of a **Data Cloud**, an **Algo Container** with the developer’s algo, and a **Backtesting Engine**.

#### Private Cloud Deployments

Each Foundry is spun up as a private cloud environment. Developers can choose to deploy:

* **Locally** on their own desktop, laptop, or server machine (free)
* **In a cloud provider** of their choosing (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) — either in their own cloud account (free) or in Datafye’s managed account (paid)

This ensures complete resource isolation and performance consistency regardless of where you deploy.

### Algo Trading

**Algo Trading** is where strategies go live. Once an algo has been developed and tested in the Foundry, the developer moves to a Trading Environment to validate it against real market conditions with real broker connectivity.

Trading Environments are composed of a **Data Cloud**, **Broker Connectors**, and **Algo Containers**, and support:

* **Paper trading** — Validate strategy performance with live market data and simulated order execution
* **Live trading** — Execute real trades through connected brokerage accounts

Trading composition depends on the developer’s approach:

* If a developer uses their own container for the algos, then the Trading Environment is comprised of a **Data Cloud** and a **Broker Connector**.
* If a developer uses the Datafye **Algo Container** for the algos, then the Trading Environment is comprised of a **Data Cloud**, a **Broker Connector**, and an **Algo Container** with the developer’s algo.

#### Private Cloud Deployments

Each Trading Environment is spun up as a private cloud environment. Deployment options depend on the trading mode:

* **Paper trading** — Deploy locally on your own machine (free), in your own cloud account (free), or in Datafye’s managed account (paid)
* **Live trading** — Available exclusively through Datafye’s managed cloud, ensuring compliance, monitoring, and operational excellence

This ensures complete resource isolation and performance consistency regardless of where you deploy.

### Algo Marketplace

The **Algo Marketplace** connects proven algos to investors. It offers:

* A curated storefront of vetted, ready-to-run strategies
* Seamless launch of algorithms into trading environments
* Options for both paper trading and live trading through broker integration

When an investor selects an algo from the Marketplace, Datafye provisions a dedicated Trading Environment for that investor — the same composition of **Data Cloud**, **Broker Connectors**, and **Algo Containers** that the developer used to validate the algo. Each investor gets their own private cloud environment, ensuring realistic execution and risk-controlled conditions.

This documentation focuses on the **developer journey** — from building and optimizing in the **Algo Foundry**, to validating and going live in **Algo Trading**, with the option to publish to the **Algo Marketplace** for investor access.