[steve8918]

It's an interesting idea, but most successful retail algo traders probably won't trust their bread-and-butter algos to a cloud-type solution. I've been algorithmically trading for a few years now, and I've invested money into Ninjatrader, where I program my algos and run things from my own computer.

If anyone had their own algos, they would probably be too paranoid that Quantopian would run backtesting on every single algo, and cherry pick the best ones for themselves. Whether or not it's true doesn't matter, it's most likely the common thought process that any successful algo trader would have.

That would leave only the inexperienced and beginning traders that would be more apt to fail, since algo trading is very, very, very hard.

[fawce]

Trust is essential (http://blog.quantopian.com/on-trust/). We see trust as something we earn over time with transparency and openness. We even open sourced our core intellectual property, the backtester itself: https://github.com/quantopian/zipline

We also believe setting our own incentives to match our members' needs is key to sustainable trust. That's why Quantopian doesn't invest its own capital - we want to be purely focused on and motivated by serving quants.

Being a successful quant takes many things - talent, mentorship, access to data, great systems, discipline. We started with backtesting because many aspiring quants end up skipping rigorous backtesting because of the time necessary to develop the test harness. We focused on community from the start to help connect new talent with mentors.

If you're not ready to trust us with your algorithms, I hope you'll trust us with a bit of your time. Come share some of what you've learned over the years with our community.

[dear]

Keep in mind that Getco is one of their investors. That is serious conflict of interest! These unsophisticated retail users are going to be eaten alive.

[cynicalkane]

Getco is, by all accounts, a money machine. I don't think they're gonna throw it all away by doing something pointlessly illegal like front-running hobbyists. Or maybe I don't know what you're getting at.

[niggler]

I saw this as a way to dig into the order flow business, but it seems they don't have their ducks in a row -- I would have waited for the production trading setup first (which I presume GETCO would provide via OCTEG LLC) before getting PR coverage

[brooksbp]

Do you have any book recommendations? Technical analysis? Quantitative analysis?

What makes it so hard--trying to come up with a good model?

[dunster]

I'd argue that a lot of the hard parts of algo writing are solved by Quantopian. Hard:

* Data. You need to test your idea. Most historical stock data (like Yahoo) excludes companies that went bankrupt or were bought or otherwise disappeared. That's called survivorship bias. If you run a backtest on the finance industry and you don't include things like Lehman, you're going to get the wrong answer. Add in things like Hurricane Sandy, MLK Day, 9/11, mergers, acquisitions, stock splits, etc. and data is very painful to put together. * A backtester. Once you have you data, what do you put it into? How do you calculate commissions? How do you calculate slippage (your order affects the price, remember)? How do you avoid look-ahead-bias and other bugs that plague backtesters?

Coming up with an idea to trade is hard, but it's only a part of the problem. I'd say it's the most fun part of the problem, but it's only a part. Quantopian is trying to remove all of the hard parts and let you do the easy parts. We have tens of thousands of lines of code (backtester, IDE, etc.) and we're leaving the most exciting 100 lines of code to our members.

On the other question about books. I'd recommend a couple: * Ernie Chan's book is a great place to start http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic... * More advanced: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470128011/

I work at Quantopian.

[kylebrown]

Try the paper "The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game" by Lawrence Harris. I found it most enlightening. I'm paying it forward, since it was here that I saw it recommended (hat tip to tptacek iirc).

What makes a zero-sum game so hard? Competition. Read Nate Silver's book chapter on Poker for a great explanation of that. In summary: he won a lot of money playing online poker when the services were growing and there was a large supply of fishy players (losers). When the growth of new poker players stopped, and the fish had mostly left (after losing their money), then he started losing.

[gfodor]

I just read this book last night, it is pretty good:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118410858/ref=oh_details_o...

[dear]

Reading books won't get you anywhere. You have to work in the industry to know the tricks. There are a lot of smoke screen mirrors in this industry.

[csomar]

Do you mind sharing your broker? Is it available for non US residents?