For most of the history of finance, the frontier of trading technology has belonged to firms with thousands of employees and budgets to match. Foresight Research, a research lab founded this year, is betting that the next frontier belongs to a model.
The firm describes itself as an artificial-intelligence trading research lab, and its ambition is explicit: to be for trading what the large language-model labs have become for language. Its flagship system, called Oracle, is built to read market data and real-time news, decide and execute, with no human in the loop.
“Everything goes in and one decision comes out,” said Albert Ludemann, the firm's founder. “That is the whole idea. Not a tool that helps a trader. A model that trades.”
The company says Oracle is trained on proprietary and real-time data and is tested after costs before it is allowed to trade. It publishes the method behind its research notes, which cover familiar effects such as overnight drift and the turn-of-the-month pattern, and it runs a public terminal that replays the model's recent decisions session by session.
Foresight Research is privately held and founder-led. It has not disclosed assets under management, outside investors or audited returns, and it says it offers no financial service to the public at this stage. The firm did not provide independently verified performance data for this article.
That caution is shared by outsiders. “Every year someone announces the model that replaces the trader,” said Dr. Katrin Vogel, who studies automation in financial markets. “The interesting question is never the demonstration. It is what the track record looks like after three bad quarters.”
Mr. Ludemann says that is precisely the test he welcomes. The firm's stated plan is to let Oracle's record speak before it accepts clients, and to publish the method rather than the marketing. If it works, a lab with a handful of people will have done what the industry's giants have been promising for a decade.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 17 of the European edition with the headline: A Small Research Lab Says It Has Built the First A.I. That Trades on Its Own.
