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Adding drag from monthly minimum/margin

I would like to add a "drag" to the returns of my algorithm to account for the fact that there must be so many dollars in trades a month or an inactivity fee is charged and I also would like to "charge" the margin rate against my returns to get more accuracy. Is there any way to do this? Can I subtract cash from my holdings each day to simulate this?

3 responses

There isn't a built-in way to simulate this in your algorithm but you can hack the commissions model to create a custom drag. Here's a skeleton example: https://www.quantopian.com/posts/removing-cash-from-portfolio-to-pay-taxes

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Hi Mike, overestimating the commissions is probably the best way to add an account drag as of now. Another hack method to simulate borrowing rates might be to hold a short position in a fixed income asset like SHY, but this will throw your leverage and other metrics out of whack so you'd have to do some accounting to adjust for this.

I will see if I can't code up a solution using a commissions hack. Thanks for the help!