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Help Getting Started
Brian Chen
posted Oct 17, 2016
Getting Started

I apologize if this question has already been answered. I could not find it with the forum search.

I am a complete beginner to backtesting and paper trading with algorithms, but I am eager to learn. Quantopian seems like a great place to get started. Do I need to know python beforehand or is it possible to work through the tutorials of Quantopian? I read the first tutorial of Quantopian and somethings made sense, but when I actually attempted to create my own algorithm, I realized I still did not even know close to enough. I was thinking about reading Learn Python the Hard Way if that is the best starting point.

1 response
Tom Dupre
Oct 19, 2016

Hi

Same boat. Its possible to mess around with sample algos and ones people have shared here to get a better idea of how the backtesting functions work, changing variables and so on. This is alot easier than writing one from sratch and helpful when you do come to write some! You will pick up a fair bit of Python doing that as well and it is more specific than book guides etc, but ofc to be fully functional it is necessary to learn it from scratch. It is fairly intuitive though. Can't comment on that book as I've never used it, the guides for Dummies (look on amazon) are good

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