Download latest version of ExPo from the ExPo project page hosted on SourceForge.

The Exchange Portal (ExPo) is a financial trading exchange platform designed to run controlled scientific trading experiments between human traders and automated trader robots. Built using the Ruby on Rails framework, ExPo is a web application that enables human users and automated trading 'robots' to connect to ExPo's artificial exchange and trade in real time over a network. ExPo can be hosted on a local machine and run over a private LAN, or exposed to the internet to enable users to connect from across the globe. Designed for controlled experimentation in behavioural economics and automated trading, ExPo enables an administrator to quickly set up an experiment, monitor in real time the behaviour of individual users and the market as a whole, and perform subsequent offline analysis of timestamped actions and events.

• ExPo is a Ruby on Rails application designed for Unix / Linux / Mac OS X.


• ExPo comes with some quick install scripts for Ubuntu OS and includes a full installation guide for hosting ExPo in the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS).


• To get up and running quickly, virtual machine appliances with ExPo pre-installed are available. These can be quickly imported into hypervisor software such as Oracle's VM VirtualBox, enabling ExPo to be run 'out of the box' on any host OS.


• All software, installation scripts and user guides are available on sourceforge.

• S. Stotter, J. Cartlidge, & D. Cliff, (2014), “Behavioural investigations of financial trading agents using Exchange Portal (ExPo).” In: N. T. Nguyen, R. Kowalczyk, A. Fred, & F. Joaquim eds. Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XVII. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 22-45. [Available Online] [Abstract] doi:10.1007/978-3-662-44994-3_2


• S. Stotter, J. Cartlidge, & D. Cliff, (2013), “Exploring assignment-adaptive (ASAD) trading agents in financial market experiments,” in Proc. 5th Int. Conf. Agents and Artif. Intelligence, Vol. 1 - Agents (ICAART-2013). J. Filipe & A. Fred, Eds. Barcelona, Spain: SciTePress, Feb. 2013, pp. 77-88. [Available Online] [Abstract] Winner of Best Student Paper Award.

ExPo is an open-source collaborative project and many people have contributed to development, including: Dave Cliff, Tomas Gražys, Michael Jewell, Owen Rogers, and Steve Stotter. While I am very grateful to everybody, a special thanks has to go to Tomas Gražys for the tremendous amount of effort he has put in to this project! Thanks Tomas.

If you would like to get involved and add your name to the list above, please contact John Cartlidge at the University of Bristol.

ExPo: The Exchange Portal Copyright © 2011, 2012, 2013 John Cartlidge