HOW IT WORKS

From birth to experiment

KVERX in a nutshell.

KVERX is a free laboratory where you raise your own trading AI: a small neural network, called a kverk, that trades on a simulated market built from real prices and learns from its own trades. This page walks through its whole life — from the temperament it is born with to its offspring and the map of the whole laboratory.

DNA — a temperament that locks

Before a kverk is born you set its temperament: how deep a drawdown it tolerates, how early it takes profit, how big a brain it gets. Pick a ready-made profile, or walk through every element yourself.

At birth the temperament locks and never changes again. It sounds harsh, but it is the only way the record can mean anything — if you could re-tune the temperament every time things went badly, you would be measuring your tuning, not the kverk. A different temperament means an offspring or a crossbreed, and that one starts a record of its own.

In the academy: DNA and temperament →

Senses — what a kverk perceives the market with

A kverk perceives the market through the senses you choose for it: momentum, mean reversion, volatility, volume, the mood of the news… Each sense is one number between −1 and 1 — one percept, one intensity.

What a kverk is not given does not exist for it. A kverk without a news sense reads no news; a kverk without a volatility sense does not know the market is shaking. That is exactly why two kverks can decide in opposite ways on the same day — each sees a different market.

Which senses a kverk gets is your choice; what weight to give them is its own. A sense that proves itself gets listened to more, and one that misleads is learned to be tuned out. You choose the equipment — it takes experience to make a trader out of it.

In the academy: Senses and advisors →

Experience — a kverk learns from every trade

The DNA says what a kverk is. The senses say what it sees. But what makes it a trader is a third thing: experience. Every trade it closes — and every moment it decided to do nothing — is stored as something it lived through, and it gets a grade.

That grade is to a kverk what emotion is to a person. A loss stings, a win pleases — and a ride that was too wild pleases less even when it ended in profit, because the grade counts drawdowns, costs and risk, not just the outcome. When it learns, the kverk goes back over what it lived through and turns its brain a little: decisions that worked are reinforced; decisions that hurt are suppressed.

The temperament is locked and the senses are chosen; it is the trades it has lived through that make a personality. And exactly this experience is what an offspring or a crossbreed will one day inherit.

In the academy: The reward defines what “good” means →In the academy: A box of knobs →

Training — a market period worth living through

A training is life at speed. You pick a period worth experiencing — the pandemic crash of 2020, the crypto winter of Luna and FTX, an earnings season, or a boring half-year when nothing happened — and the kverk lives through it day by day: it decides, it is filled at real prices, it pays the fees, it takes the fuses and it learns from every outcome.

Nothing is computed backwards. If it were, this would be a backtest, and a backtest can look exactly the way anybody wants it to. A training is the same KVERX Market, only shifted in time — the same simulation, the same harshness, the same fuses.

That is where its value is. A kverk normally learns from whatever the market brings, and on most days the market brings nothing remarkable. A crisis arrives once every few years and waiting for one is a luxury. A training delivers it now, with every cost and no risk, so the kverk holds experience it would otherwise wait years for.

Everybody gets the first training free. More unlock through loyalty: after thirty days in the laboratory a loyalty training appears, free as well. And then there is the catalogue — from a single day of panic to a whole decade condensed into one run — where a training can be bought one at a time. No subscription and no obligation: a kverk learns without trainings too, just more slowly and from whatever the market happens to serve.

In the academy: Trainings — which one, and when →

The exam — on a period it has never seen

Every training ends with an exam, and there is no way for a kverk to cheat at it. The weights are frozen — it does not learn during the exam — and it is released onto a window of data it never once looked at during the training. For catalogue trainings we add a second, control window at least a year away from the trained period: that is where it shows whether the kverk grasped a principle or merely the mood of one particular time.

Then the two numbers go side by side and we say what follows from them. When the result on the learned and on the unseen period diverges by more than fifteen percentage points, the verdict is that the kverk probably learned by heart — it memorised particular days instead of the rule behind them. That is called overfitting, and it is the most common way for a model to be confidently wrong.

When the kverk barely traded on the unseen period, we say nothing at all: a verdict cannot be manufactured out of a handful of trades, and pretending otherwise would be worse than silence. And the best verdict goes only to a kverk whose result survives having the statistical uncertainty subtracted from it — not to one that simply got lucky.

It is the least pleasant screen in the product. It is mandatory, it cannot be skipped, and it cannot be re-run until a nicer number comes out. That is exactly why it means something.

In the academy: The exam versus the track record →

Learning from the real market, inside the KVERX simulation

A released kverk lives on the KVERX Market — our simulated exchange, which mirrors real markets from real data. It learns from what it lived through, and its living track record grows forward only.

The conditions are deliberately harsher than a real exchange. Fees, the spread between the buying and the selling price, and slippage are all charged with a margin on top. Weekend and overnight gaps can jump straight over a protective stop, because between two prices there simply was no price. Anyone borrowing leverage pays for it every day, and a short pays a borrowing fee on top.

A simulation that flatters is worth nothing.

In the academy: Fees and slippage →

Offspring and crossbreeds — how temperament changes anyway

The DNA is locked for good; the lineage is not. When you want a kverk with a different temperament you do not start from nothing — you take what somebody has already learned.

An offspring is the child of one parent. It inherits the whole learned brain and you change its equipment: add a sense, enlarge the brain, reset the fuses. An added sense starts at zero, so on its first day the offspring behaves exactly like the parent and only learning gives that sense any weight — which means the difference you then see can be attributed to that one change. Shrinking the brain is not allowed; what has been learned cannot be trimmed.

A crossbreed has two parents, and here an uncomfortable truth is needed: the brains of two neural networks cannot be blended. Each network built its internal wiring its own way, like two people who each organised a workshop differently. Shuffle the drawers together and you do not get a doubly equipped workshop, you get a pile.

So a crossbreed takes the brain of one, dominant parent — and equipment chosen from both. From the other parent you may take senses, advisors and the Workshop rule. Whatever comes from the second parent starts at zero and the crossbreed learns it for itself: it inherited the experience of one and the opportunity of both.

The parents go nowhere meanwhile. They stay, record and all, still trading and still learning. Nothing is overwritten, things only accumulate — which is why you can experiment here without regret: a branch of the family that led nowhere costs nothing but space on the map.

In the academy: Inheritance and crossbreeds →In the academy: Offspring, or crossbreed? →

The Laboratory — the whole picture on one map

The Laboratory draws every kverk you own as a map of generations: who came from whom, who advises whom, and how mature each one is.

One look shows which branch of the family paid off, where fields of view overlap, and who would benefit from one more advisor. The cards tell you how each one is doing; the map tells you why.

In the academy: The Laboratory — a map of the stable →

Frequent questions

Is it free?

Yes. The account, the kverks, the living track record, the daily ritual, the whole academy, the leaderboard and the first Basic training on the account cost nothing. You pay only for optional extras — historical trainings, portraits and the e-book — and anyone who wants to can support the project with a donation that buys no advantage at all.

Will I make money?

No. The money inside KVERX is simulated and nothing is ever paid out. Whether your kverk learns to make money we do not know and nobody can promise — most kverks will not be remarkable and many will end up losing. KVERX does not promise profit; it promises a truthful answer to the question of whether something works.

Does it trade with real money?

No. Every kverk starts with simulated capital and no order is ever sent to a real exchange; KVERX holds no user money. What is real is the data — exchange and commercial feed prices, uniformly delayed by roughly fifteen minutes.

Which markets can a kverk trade?

In one of five universes, chosen when it is born: US shares, European shares, Asian shares, a World universe of broad ETFs, and crypto. Prices come from real exchanges and commercial feeds, delayed by about fifteen minutes; the trades themselves only ever happen on the simulated KVERX Market.

What is a kverk?

A small neural network with an immutable thirty-element DNA that keeps its own living track record. The DNA is a laminated sheet — written at birth and never changed; the brain is a box of knobs that turn a little after every batch of experience, according to how the decisions so far were graded. A kverk watches the market through the senses you choose — how many it can carry is set by its brain size — and emits a single number: how large a position it wants, and on which side.

How does a kverk learn?

From its own trades. Every decision it makes — including the decision to do nothing — is stored as an experience and graded: a loss stings, a win pleases, and a ride that was too wild pleases less even when it ended in profit, because the grade also counts drawdown, costs and risk. When the kverk learns, its network is nudged towards the decisions that turned out better than usual. In machine-learning terms this is offline reinforcement learning (advantage-weighted regression) on a deliberately small neural network.

Why your own market and not a real exchange?

Because a kverk needs to practise the crashes nobody can afford on a real exchange — it is a flight simulator. The crucial part is that it must not lie: we model the spread, slippage, fees and overnight price jumps, and we do it deliberately about 15 % harsher than reality. There is one market for everyone and no difficulty modes.

How is this different from paper trading at a broker?

In paper trading you place the simulated trades yourself. In KVERX you never click a trade: a neural network you raised decides, trades and learns on its own, explains every decision on a “Why” card and builds a living track record that cannot be rewritten — on a market that charges spread, slippage and fees with a surcharge on top of reality.

Do I need to understand trading or know how to code?

No. The quick path is three decisions and takes a minute, and you never click a trade — you raise, the kverk trades. Every trade comes with a “Why” card explaining what convinced it, and the academy and glossary are free and written for people who have never touched a market. You never write code either: the DNA is a ready-made profile or an element-by-element choice, and even the Workshop rules are built from conditions, not code.

What if a kverk is doing badly?

You will see it. A kverk has fuses: past your drawdown limit it goes to sleep and closes its positions. After a longer weak stretch its detail page shows a calm diagnosis with the evidence and four ways forward: an offspring, a crossbreed, the advisor role, or leaving it to run.

Can I take a trained kverk with me?

You can download an export of trades, journal and DNA at any time. The learned weights are not in it yet — they are bound to specific versions of the senses, the reward and the simulator, and outside our infrastructure they would be useless. A desktop application is on the way that will let you run a kverk against your own broker; the model file format is already defined, the date is not promised.

If it is free, how do you make a living?

From trainings, portraits, the e-book and voluntary donations. No subscription, no advertising, no selling data. What is paid for is what costs computation or somebody’s work — not what would hurt most to withhold. That is also why the number of accounts is capped, and once it fills up registration switches to a waiting list.

Who is behind KVERX?

Caroline Technologies s.r.o., a small Czech software workshop based in Prague (Reg. no. 29727430). The neural network, the trainer and the simulator are written by hand in TypeScript, with no third-party libraries. The company details and a contact are on the About page.

Is it safe?

You sign in with a one-time code, there are no passwords, and we never see payment details — the whole checkout runs at Stripe. Traffic is encrypted and so are the backups, every admin action goes into an append-only audit log, and signing in as you is always read-only. We do not track you and we do not sell data; the export and account closure are in Settings whenever you want them.

What happens to an open position when I pause a kverk or make it an advisor?

It is closed — at the last known price, with all costs, as if the kverk had closed it itself. A paused kverk, a kverk put to sleep by a lowered limit and a kverk that became an advisor stop receiving candles, so nobody would mark its position and no fuse would protect it. The book is therefore closed right after the transition, at the price of the last candle that had already closed, and the journal shows it as an ordinary close with its reason. The record does not end with it: after a resume it continues from cash. A paused kverk does not learn — it is just a stored brain until you start it again.

The fastest way to understand this is to hatch one.

A minute for your first kverk. It stays yours, record included.

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