alpha-zoo

alpha-zoo is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from HKUDS/Vibe-Trading. It costs 79 tokens per session (1,036 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A catalogue of ready-made quantitative trading formulas, called factors or alphas, plus tools for testing them against market data. It includes collections such as Fama-French and Carhart, which are established ways to describe investment returns.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to browse alpha metadata, inspect a named formula, test one or many formulas on a market universe, or evaluate your own factor data.
Why use it?
It saves time when looking for an existing factor and helps measure whether one formula or a whole collection has been useful over a chosen market and period.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to browse alpha metadata, inspect a named formula, test one or many formulas on a market universe, or evaluate your own factor data.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hkuds/vibe-trading/alpha-zoo
About the project

Vibe-Trading is a personal trading agent that gives an AI system tools for market analysis, algorithmic trading, backtesting, and related workflows. It is for users who want an agent to research and evaluate trading strategies or manage simulated and other trading activities. The catalogue contains skills that expose these trading capabilities to compatible agents.

HKUDS/Vibe-Trading · 33,177 stars · on GitHub · vibetrading.wiki

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add HKUDS/Vibe-Trading --skill alpha-zoo
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/HKUDS/Vibe-Trading

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for alpha-zoo

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hkuds/vibe-trading/alpha-zoo/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hkuds/vibe-trading/alpha-zoo)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hkuds/vibe-trading/alpha-zoo"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hkuds/vibe-trading/alpha-zoo/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for alpha-zoo

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hkuds/vibe-trading/alpha-zoo"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hkuds/vibe-trading/alpha-zoo.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,036 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. ✓ AI security review Fable 5.1 · 6 Sept 2026 📄 Read the review Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00079 $0.01036
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00518
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00207
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00104

Measured 11d ago against content hash 38a2168fe94d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alpha-zoo scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • alpha-zoo — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
agent/src/skills/alpha-zoo/SKILL.md · 58 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 58 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Alpha Zoo

Purpose

When the user asks about prebuilt cross-sectional alphas — Kakushadze 101, GTJA 191, Qlib 158, Fama-French / Carhart — or wants to bench a whole zoo on an investable universe (CSI 300, S&P 500, BTC-USDT, ...), this skill orients you. The zoo is the curated library; the bench is the evaluator.

Tools Available

Tool When to use
alpha_zoo Browse the library. action=list_alphas to enumerate (filterable by zoo / theme / universe), action=get_alpha for one alpha's metadata, action=health for registry load status.
alpha_bench Run IC / IR on one alpha or a whole zoo over a universe + period. Emits an HTML report.
factor_analysis Ad-hoc factor evaluation from a user-supplied factor CSV + return CSV. Use this when the user has their own factor (not in the zoo).

Decision Tree

  • "list all momentum alphas" → alpha_zoo with action=list_alphas, theme=momentum.
  • "show me gtja191_alpha_001" → alpha_zoo with action=get_alpha, alpha_id=gtja191_alpha_001.
  • "bench all of GTJA 191 on CSI 300 from 2020 to 2024" → alpha_bench with zoo=gtja191, universe=csi300, period=2020-2024.
  • "is the registry healthy" → alpha_zoo with action=health — surfaces loaded, failed, and per-error reasons.
  • User uploads my_factor.csvfactor_analysis (zoo tools are for prebuilt alphas only).

Zoo Inventory

Zoo Description Approx. count
kakushadze101 Formulaic alphas from Kakushadze's 2015 paper. Mix of momentum, reversal, volume, and microstructure. ~101
gtja191 Guotai Junan 191 alphas — A-share focused cross-sectional factors. ~191
qlib158 Microsoft Qlib's 158 alpha factors — features tuned for ML pipelines. ~158
classical Fama-French 3/5-factor + Carhart momentum. <10

Counts are nominal; check alpha_zoo action=health for the live count currently loaded.

Constraints

  • No per-stock per-date factor values are surfaced to the agent. IC results are aggregate stats (mean / std / IR / positive-ratio); the HTML report shows top-N by IR plus formulas, never the underlying panel.
  • Lookahead is banned in the operator set. delta(df, d) requires d >= 1; the negative-shift Ref(df, -n) form does not exist. See docs/alpha-zoo/spec.md for the full operator catalogue.
  • Universe loaders may not be wired for every market yet. When alpha_bench returns universe loader for X not yet implemented, that's the W2 scaffold — the universe is recognised but the data pull lands in W4.
  • Do not expose absolute filesystem paths in agent output. The bench tool writes to ~/.vibe-trading/reports/ by default; refer to it by that shorthand, not by the resolved absolute path.
  • alpha_zoo is read-only. alpha_bench writes a single HTML file per run — no scratch state elsewhere.

Read the full file on GitHub · 58 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 58 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A 38a2168fe94d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alpha-zoo is a skill published in the GitHub repository HKUDS/Vibe-Trading (33,177 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 1,036 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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