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Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading

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Re: Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading

#2
It is a great article, but why on earth someone will use a service like Quantopian or similar service?

They are your competitor and who will prevent a disgruntle employee or a hacker to steel your successful trading strategy?

Just buy some data from eBay, you can get 20 years of historical stock market data for less than $100 and you can test any trading strategy or idea imaginable, including trend following, buy and hold ETFs, etc...

The barrier of entry is pretty low and you can develop a great lifestyle business with no customers, employees and investors around that...

Re: Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading

#3
post #2

It is a great article, but why on earth someone will use a service like Quantopian or similar service? They are your competitor and who will prevent a disgruntle employee or a hacker to steel your successful trading strategy? Just buy some data from eBay, you can get 20 years of historical stock market data for less than $100 and you can test any trading strategy or idea imaginable, including trend following, buy and…

Have you done this? If so it would be great to get your perspective

Re: Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading

#5
post #2

It is a great article, but why on earth someone will use a service like Quantopian or similar service? They are your competitor and who will prevent a disgruntle employee or a hacker to steel your successful trading strategy? Just buy some data from eBay, you can get 20 years of historical stock market data for less than $100 and you can test any trading strategy or idea imaginable, including trend following, buy and…

Have you done this? If so it would be great to get your perspective

Yes, I am doing it as a side project and I am looking to retire in a few years and live off that...

Re: Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading

#6
post #2

It is a great article, but why on earth someone will use a service like Quantopian or similar service? They are your competitor and who will prevent a disgruntle employee or a hacker to steel your successful trading strategy? Just buy some data from eBay, you can get 20 years of historical stock market data for less than $100 and you can test any trading strategy or idea imaginable, including trend following, buy and…

Mostly a matter of trust. I trust Quantopian more than I trust some random asshole on eBay purporting to sell accurate historical data. Plus, Quantopian is convenient.

Re: Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading

#7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done this? If so it would be great to get your perspective

Yes, I am doing it as a side project and I am looking to retire in a few years and live off that...

I second the above comment; you should write about the process and how it is working out for you.

Re: Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading

#8
post #2

It is a great article, but why on earth someone will use a service like Quantopian or similar service? They are your competitor and who will prevent a disgruntle employee or a hacker to steel your successful trading strategy? Just buy some data from eBay, you can get 20 years of historical stock market data for less than $100 and you can test any trading strategy or idea imaginable, including trend following, buy and…

Mostly a matter of trust. I trust Quantopian more than I trust some random asshole on eBay purporting to sell accurate historical data. Plus, Quantopian is convenient.

This is the cheapest data I can find and you can do random checks to verify the data...

if you know a cheaper or even better a free place please advice...

Re: Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading

#9
post #2

It is a great article, but why on earth someone will use a service like Quantopian or similar service? They are your competitor and who will prevent a disgruntle employee or a hacker to steel your successful trading strategy? Just buy some data from eBay, you can get 20 years of historical stock market data for less than $100 and you can test any trading strategy or idea imaginable, including trend following, buy and…

Because they do so much work upfront for you. I worked in algorithmic trading for a bit over 10 years but left in 2014. I spent a few months in my spare time building out a trading and backtesting platform, pulling data off of yahoo finance, connecting to Interactive Brokers via their C++ API, etc. It was all very slow and tedious, and during my googling one day, I come across quantopian. I felt like an idiot- they already had free access to morningstar with a decent API around it, tons of other datasets you could subscribe to, and a fully fleshed out backtesting platform with risk measures, pretty graphs, etc.

It would have taken me months-years to get to that point. Shortly after they also included integrations to IB and Robinhood so you could very easily take your ideas and actually live trade them. I immediately stopped development on my trading platform and just started using Q's.

Q could potentially take my algorithm and start using it themselves, though they actually put money into algorithms they think are promising and share the profits with you. That's a small risk IMHO. Hackers and the like... I did this stuff for 10+ years. People WAY over estimate the value of this code- you have an idea, you backtest, hope it works, and then you put it in the wild. I have never seen an algo that is a real guaranteed money maker (aside from arbitrage/hft stuff). What are these hackers going to do when they take a 10% loss one month and don't understand why? Some "signals" can be used in-line fairly generically with other algorithms to enhance their performance, but I will still bet on the guy that knows/understands the algorithms to not lose his shirt, then some hacker dude that likely has no capital to begin with and may not even understand the basics of financial markets.

One thing you seem to overlook is that it is one thing to go buy a bunch of historical data off ebay, but you need to constantly update that if you are going to live trade- Q handles that part as well.

If I was looking to make a business out of this, I would build my own platform. But using it as a research platform to invest my own money, Quantopian is awesome.

Re: Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading

#10
post #9
post #2

It is a great article, but why on earth someone will use a service like Quantopian or similar service? They are your competitor and who will prevent a disgruntle employee or a hacker to steel your successful trading strategy? Just buy some data from eBay, you can get 20 years of historical stock market data for less than $100 and you can test any trading strategy or idea imaginable, including trend following, buy and…

Because they do so much work upfront for you. I worked in algorithmic trading for a bit over 10 years but left in 2014. I spent a few months in my spare time building out a trading and backtesting platform, pulling data off of yahoo finance, connecting to Interactive Brokers via their C++ API, etc. It was all very slow and tedious, and during my googling one day, I come across quantopian. I felt like an idiot- they a…

My experience is unfortunately different, I found the data for some delisted stocks like HTZ missing which will massively screw the past results due to the survivorship bias...
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