QuantConnectReviews of quantconnect.com

It's absolute trash, bad documented and the debugging mode doesn't even have a console. Furthermore there is only very limited data available

Oh my lord I am too busy during day to write review but my experience with QuantConnect is sooo BAD I am compelled to write a bad review. Their website is extremely poorly designed and they should fire their UI designer immediately or maybe pay more for them to do a better job. I feel like I need a manual just to navigate the ugly and complex site. Their user documentation is abysmaI and their design of the web-based IDE to write your algo script is slow and buggy as it freezes alot and you have to refresh the page. Only their LEAN command line option is useful but its still a pain to setup and learn but still has bugs like local backtesting differs from the cloud. I tried them out for a week before committing to pay for a "researcher license" to use the backtest quicker. I wanted to then buy a live testing node simply to see if their live prices work but when you try to order this from their website it automatically buys you a bundle with a massive support fee included which is not what I need. I only found this out after they email me the invoice to my disgust at a huge extra fee. I asked for a refund of this extra since I only wanted the live node not any extra support but they refuse. Extremely bad service so I'm warning others to be careful they will force you to pay extras you don't need when you order from the site.

I start to using Quantconnect after the shutdown of Quantopian. Unfortunately, Quantopian was far easier to use, more realiable, and quicker in backtesting. Quantconnect is still a good tool but a lot of work must be done.

QC is an extremely difficult system to use for the average trader (I'm comparing it to competitors products with respect to coding, flexibility and ability to live trade) Given reasonable investigation the data it uses for backtesting is questionable (they cut you off if you look at too much data) and most importantly it only allows you to back test and live trade on a small list of underlyings: good for Bitcoin and fx (I assume but don't know) but NOT for equities and listed securities and most futures.

QuantConnect enables algorithmic traders of all experience levels to turn an idea into a reality. I first found QuantConnect many many years ago while contemplating building my own backtesting platform. I was relieved to find QuantConnect and its open sourced LEAN project. The engineering philosophy that underpins the platform is one of unlimited customizability while also making the most common tasks simple or automatic. The full QuantConnect platform provides its users many tools that improve the efficiency and most importantly reduce the time between idea and feasibility testing. As with any software product, time needs to be spent learning the APIs, but with documentation for the entire platform available directly in the browser combined with QuantConnect's algorithm bootcamp and extensive documentation of recipes detailing how to use each and every feature, this spinup time is greatly reduced, especially if you're already confident with your programming skills. QuantConnect even provides a free tier, which is awesome. You can test your trading ideas using free backtesting and when you've built something worth trading you can run it through paper trading to make sure you haven't overfit your algorithm and then run it against your real brokerage account. Even if you don't have your own capital to trade, if you've built a great algorithm you can license it out to other investors using QuantConnect's new Alpha Streams Marketplace. All software products have bugs. What differentiates the good from the bad is the response. From everything I've heard, QuantConnect support is very timely with their responses and it's usually not a bug, but rather a coding error. When bugs are found, they are fixed in github and once the fix is merged its available on the QuantConnect platform within about 5 minutes!

I joined QuantConnect back in 2018 as a hobbyist trying to learn the basics of algorithmic trading. Three years later, and countless hours spent on LEAN and QuantConnect, I can only speak highly of this platform that helped me make the career change I was looking for. * Complexity: This is not some drag-and-drop platform to build out-of-the-box trading bots. Yes, the API takes some time to learn but I think that should be expected of any serious software that offers this level of flexibility and robustness. * Community: I've seen the community grow over the years and become this amazing mix of backgrounds that share creative ideas and help each other. * AlphaStreams Marketplace: I've personally been developing and submitting alphas to the marketplace from the beginning, some of which got licensed by clients. The criteria to enter is strict to ensure statistical significance of results and competition is fierce, but this growing marketplace has the potential to revolutionize the open-source quant scene by providing a stable income to alpha developers. * Team: I've worked closely with the QuantConnect team over the years and their professionalism and integrity are out of the question. Not only I trust them with holding my algorithms, but so do my institutional clients for whom I work in QuantConnect. All in all, a fantastic platform for anyone looking for institutional-grade software, a thriving community of like-minded algo traders, and a hard-working trustworthy team of professionals.

Over two (fun!) years the QuantConnect team have assisted me in (1) My programming...which at the beginning was all but non-existent. With this, the customer support, community help and other resources e.g. GitHub provided me with the required information to develop my algos. (2) Connectivity....I can connect one of my algos to one of my Interactive Brokers accounts in about 2 minutes. Its that easy. (3) Ability to license....Many of the systems I have developed over the last couple of years and submitted to the AlphaStreams marketplace are being licensed. Like any other endeavor in life - this takes hard work and a lot of effort. I have had no problems with backtest times - but obviously the times will depend on the amount of data being crunched in the background. So Im very happy - a friendly bunch of people doing real innovative stuff. I cant wait what the next few years bring!

cannot recommend Cons: - lack of transparency (deleting critical statements in forum) - alpha market is a joke. there are no trading firms paying license fees for algos. - many alphas in market are likely overfitted - setting up LEAN for local machine is buggy and complicated - unnecessarily complex API, difficult to learn, poor docs (at least for python developers), LEAN is C# but most users need Python - research (notebook) is slow, throwing time out errors when analyzing large datasets - backtesting is slow when trading many assets with high resolution data, throwing time out errors all the time - web ide limited, poor debugging tool - switching between local (Skylight) and cloud is tiresome, no efficient workflow for algo development - limited possibilities to analyze and visualize backtest results - buggy API, bugfixes take too much time - expensive for retail/invididuals (default pack = +800$/year) Pros: - community provide support in forum - open source (LEAN) - large and reliable database including tick data for many securities - L1 quote data available for equities - live trading - event-driven backtesting engine - all-in-one ecosystem (research, backtest, live trading, data, optimization)