Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
cloud9trader.com
Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
#2Anyone who does algorithmic trading, what platform do you use? Do you roll your own? I’ve had a passing interest in this field for years but have not done anything myself.
Re: Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
#3Being that the account that submitted this is still green, I'm going to assume that the person behind it is either a user of Cloud9Trader or affiliated with it. If that is the case, I have a few questions:
1. Who is the intended demographic here? Based on pricing and features there's no way this is intended for institutional funds, so is this targeted at amateurs or small professionals? It states it's targeting "beginners to get grips with quant trading for free", but that strikes me as a poor market to try and sell to.
2. Can users' algorithms be seen by the platform? If so, that's a non-starter for many professionals.
3. Does Cloud9Trader provide historical data or just compute power? If historical data is provided, what resolutions are available?
4. Which brokers are supported? It seems like just FXCM and Oanda; are there plans for others?
5. How are backtest compute units measured? The pricing page states:
"A backtest compute unit is a measure of processing resource made available for backtesting. 10 units is equivalent to one month of backtesting every tick, or 10 months of backtesting minute data."
but it's unclear to me how an atomic unit of compute time can be generalizably the same for every user's backtesting workflow.
6. What is the non-pricing data you're providing? It looks like you're just reselling premium geographic data from Quadrant and free data from Quandl, but the naming scheme is not clear on what it's providing.
I guess while I'm here I might as well make this point: I'm deeply pessimistic that this tool would meaningfully improve the productivity or profitability of real-world quantitative trading. I also don't think it makes sense to target "beginners in quant trading" because quantitative trading is one of those things which mostly doesn't (and shouldn't) exist outside of teams and companies. I consider it somewhat predatory to offer a service that implicitly encourages inexperienced non-professionals to get into this - quantitative trading is very unlike programming and entrepreneurship in that there is no straightforward way to teach yourself or bootstrap.
Re: Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
#4Introduction video: https://www.cloud9trader.com/documentation/video-tutorials/l...
So the following community algo (https://www.cloud9trader.com/algorithms/1085/code) claims to have averaged 0.6% monthly profit, which is a 7.2% annual return. Actually pretty awesome.
Why is it only trading between 5AM and 6PM?
function isGoodTimeToTrade() {
if (hour >= 5 && hour Re: Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
#5Anyone who does algorithmic trading, what platform do you use? Do you roll your own? I’ve had a passing interest in this field for years but have not done anything myself.
That depends on what you mean by "platform." Professional quantitative traders do not use services like this one. Virtually all of them - profitable and otherwise - work within firms that have separate teams for strategy research, strategy development, infrastructure, IT and internal software development. Typically there are sub-teams specializing in research and implementation (each) for risk management, execution, data processing and portfolio optimization.
So the most honest answer to your question, insofar as the question makes sense, is that algorithmic traders roll their own under the auspices of the firm employing them. In fact the way that this service structures their pricing is strange and unintuitive to me, and I can't imagine professional traders would agree with it.
While I have known people to trade on their own in a way that can be legitimately called "quantitative" (and even do so profitably), they all worked within a firm before doing that, and all of them targeted strategies that allowed them to capture a greater amount of the profit for an otherwise small total revenue that would generally be considered too illiquid and capacity constrained for institutional trading.
Quantitative trading in a solo capacity is basically a myth. Most of those who actually have a non-trivial attempt at it think they're doing it because they're working with a large amount of data and doing "backtesting", but that's well below table stakes. To put it in perspective, that's like saying you wrote and maintain an internet-wide search engine half as good as DuckDuckGo. It's a meteoric amount of work for one person to keep all aspects of an algorithmic trading strategy running smoothly.
Re: Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
#6Anyone who does algorithmic trading, what platform do you use? Do you roll your own? I’ve had a passing interest in this field for years but have not done anything myself.
I've tried a few:
- Quantopian: Was good, has tons of data and makes things very easy. Unfortunately you can't easily live trade your algorithms anymore.
- QuantConnect: Open source, works okay, at the time I wanted it for options trading though and their support for options chains isn't so good.
- Zorro: Closed source, paid, uses a weird custom variant of C but works surprisingly well. Mainly focused on forex though.
- Others: There are others, like this one, that are mostly unusable because they miss something essential, like broker support or data.
QuantConnect is the only real packaged option these days I think but it's also not hard to roll your own. There are brokerages with _really_ easy to use APIs (Tradier is the first that comes to mind).
Re: Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
#7Introduction video: https://www.cloud9trader.com/documentation/video-tutorials/l... So the following community algo ( https://www.cloud9trader.com/algorithms/1085/code ) claims to have averaged 0.6% monthly profit, which is a 7.2% annual return. Actually pretty awesome. Why is it only trading between 5AM and 6PM? function isGoodTimeToTrade() { if (hour >= 5 && hour
That algorithm would have a poor Sharpe/Sortino/Calmar ratio. The risk-adjusted return is bad, though not as comically bad as some of the others on the homepage with 40%+ drawdowns.
5am -> 6pm is most likely targeting a specific trading "session". See: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/08/3-market-syst...
Re: Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
#8Anyone who does algorithmic trading, what platform do you use? Do you roll your own? I’ve had a passing interest in this field for years but have not done anything myself.
I do some algorithmic trading and automated investment in the crypto space. I trade intra-exchange and do arbitrage between pairs (tri-arb). I also occasionally rebalance into an index of coins I like. Note that I do this at a fairly small scale, so not sure if my answer really matters much.
Although there are a lot of platforms for trading crypto, when it comes to arb, I found that you need to have control over a lot of things, most importantly:
- which data center you host your code in - the way you get data from the exchange - not just prices and order books, but also current balances and orders - the way you push orders to the exchange
With "the way" I mean mostly which APIs you use and how, the last few milliseconds of optimization for me were usually gained by making multiple simultaneous connections to the exchange and trying to figure out the fastest one.
For my rebalanced index-like portfolio I made a little script initially and then turned it into a side project, plug: https://nazcabot.io
Re: Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
#9Anyone who does algorithmic trading, what platform do you use? Do you roll your own? I’ve had a passing interest in this field for years but have not done anything myself.
Most roll their own and use C / C++ / custom hardware for bare metal performance.
Disclaimer: I've worked for two of the largest HFT firms in the US over the course of the past 11 years.
Re: Cloud9Trader – Simple, powerful platform for algorithmic trading
#10Anyone who does algorithmic trading, what platform do you use? Do you roll your own? I’ve had a passing interest in this field for years but have not done anything myself.
flask + postgres + keras - it’s rather easy to train models based of arxiv research papers. eg i trained a model using this method (https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01987) and trade fairly frequently on minuscule amounts using the kraken (cryptocurrency exchange) api.