WealthLab

What it is

WealthLab is a Windows desktop platform for building a systematic strategy, backtesting it across a whole portfolio, and routing its orders at a broker. Strategies are written in C# against a documented .NET API, or assembled from drag-and-drop Building Blocks that generate the same C# underneath — the blocks are a starting point, not a walled-off beginner mode.

If you are searching for "Wealth-Lab" because Fidelity once gave it to you, that product was Wealth-Lab Pro and it was decommissioned in August 2020. This is the original team's own rewrite, sold directly by Quantacula; nothing transfers, and a Fidelity account buys you nothing here.

The portfolio simulation is what you are paying for. Bundled DataSets track real index membership over time — the Nasdaq 100 as it was in 2011, including the companies later removed — so a backtest sees the survivors and the casualties both. Optimisation is exhaustive, shrinking-window or walk-forward, with 2D and 3D parameter-stability surfaces.

Two versions are sold and updated in parallel. WealthLab 8 (build 173, 8 September 2026) runs on .NET 8; WealthLab 9, released 3 August 2026 and on build 7 by the same date, adds .NET 10, an AI strategy generator and a built-in REST and MCP service that lets an assistant such as Claude list strategies, compile C# without running it, and fire backtests with stated costs.

Pricing

$49.95 a month, $399.95 a year, or $499.95 a year for Premium — and Premium is the tier that matters, because it bundles every first-party extension and the extensions are what carry the broker connections. Bought singly they are $49.95 each for Interactive Brokers, Alpaca, Tradier, Schwab or Kraken, $99.95 for Deep Learning or Chart Patterns. A lifetime licence is $1,595 with two years of updates, then $149.95 a year to keep them coming.

A free trial needs no card, there is no free tier, and nothing is refundable: cancelling stops the next charge and runs access to the end of the period.

Data & coverage

Wealth-Data, included, is end-of-day only: the Dow 30, Nasdaq 100, S&P 100 and S&P 500, the German DAX and MDAX, and most of the liquid US ETFs. Free Yahoo and Alpha Vantage providers ship in the box, both on thin free tiers. Anything past them — real intraday history, dependable streaming, non-US markets — is your own arrangement: a broker feed, or IQFeed, Tiingo, EODHD or ThetaData through an extension.

Integrations

Automated trading at Interactive Brokers, Schwab, TradeStation, Alpaca and Tradier, crypto at Kraken, Binance and KuCoin, more brokers through the Medved Trader bridge, and signal publishing to Collective2 and Discord. Over a hundred community extensions ship with source, and a broker's trade export replays as a backtest.

Limitations

• Windows only. No macOS or Linux build, and the vendor's own answer is a VM.
• No free tier, and the headline subscription is not the real price for most buyers: without Premium, each broker connection is a separate $49.95 purchase.
• The included data is end-of-day. Intraday and real-time work means a second bill somewhere else before the platform does what the marketing page shows.
• No screener in the ordinary sense — you scan by running a strategy over a DataSet, not by filtering stocks on fundamentals.
• Options are a passenger: whatever a broker such as Tradier or Interactive Brokers hands back, plus historical greeks if you pay for ThetaData. There is no chain, spread or greeks analytics layer of its own.

Alternatives

MultiCharts and NinjaTrader cover the same Windows ground with stronger chart trading and weaker portfolio backtesting; Amibroker is the cheaper veteran with its own language. If you would rather not run Windows, the Python frameworks in this category do the same job in a notebook.