Hello Paul,
If you have a programming background then this should come relatively easily to you.
Start by copying the samples in the Help and API docs from the Help menu. Then search the Community forums for keywords similar to algos you want to build. Add interesting forum comments that you find to a bookmarked folder containing Quantopian stuff. Then after 2 to 3 weeks of reading, start copy and pasting pieces of code that are useful into an algo that already works (like some of the examples in the Help and API) past one line at a time and hit CTRL+B, if you don't get an error, add more code. Every 5 lines or so do a full backtest . From how I recall that is how I started out. Only I had 0 coding experience and I used the coding academy to learn the code along the way. Don't reinvent code that is already working, steal it! ahahh
Happy coding.

Also, pay special attention to the Fundamentals section in the Help and API docs, I would imagine at some point you will use this to filter out the stocks that pay dividends and disregard those that do not. Then you will prop sort those with highest dividends and so on.

Darth
Please post a picture of your light saber.

Haha, although I'm a big fan of the Star Wars universe, I've never been into collecting. Mostly because I'm very frugal and a fiscal conservative. I prefer that my $ remain liquid and as such it is not tied up in possessions or items that depreciate.

I am aware of this lore in Scottish culture (http://www.extremely-sharp.com/blogs/eslife/17531404-knife-history-drawing-blood-lore), but I am unsure if the Sith follow a similar practice. If they did it would make getting a picture for you rather difficult. I'll bring it up my master. lol

For dividends, see:

https://www.quantopian.com/data/eventvestor/dividends

Poking around, it looks like pipeline should support the EventVestor data. Maybe someone knows of an example?

Note that free data are available 01 Jan 2007 - 09 Apr 2014. Beyond that, it is $75/month. It is a mystery to me how charging for data fits with the crowd-sourced hedge fund business plan, by the way. I just don't see users paying for data, just to build a case based on paper trading that their algo should be used in the hedge fund.

Thanks for the tips. If it took me more than 2-3 days to pick up a language/Object Model, I would start selling ice cream cones. (would you like sprinkles with that?) I'm not really bragging (OK so I am bragging) so much as defining what someone that has been doing anything as long as I have would say about their trade.

I have ?enhanced? and posted a thread for Robinhood Trading. I did this so that I would have something to play with. I have also posted a few other questions.

Anthony, I thought you were getting weird there for a moment, until I read "Darth."