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Backtesting trades execute vs Paper trading no trades placed

My algorithm places trades in backtesting, but when doing live paper trading with Quantopian no trades are placed. Why would trades execute in backtesting differently from live paper trading? What are the possible causes of this, and has anyone encountered this issue before?

3 responses

Hi James,

That's a tough question to answer without being able to see the code. Would you be willing to share a backtest? If not, are you using Fetcher? It's possible that the file only has data available historically.

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James,

Some other possible sources could be a different starting capital base or a scheduling logic that simply hasn't been reached yet in paper trading. Does your algo rebalance monthly or weekly?

Since I asked the original question I've stopped and restarted the paper trading, and now it seems to be making trades. I'm not sure why initially paper trading and back testing for the same day showed different results, however, after comparing yesterday's results with back testing the issue seems resolved. I'll continue to monitor.

I'm not using the fetcher. Essentially, I’m creating trigger points using data.history, then IF statements to execute/liquidate against a defined set of stocks. It's intended to run minutely and therefore rebalances ~5 times a day,

I'll keep monitoring to see if results continue to track, and follow up if they do not.

Thank you for your help!
-James