I would really like to not invest 25% of $25,000 at my first live algo attempt!

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I would really like to not invest 25% of $25,000 at my first live algo attempt!

Christopher Chalfant

posted Feb 25, 2017

Seeking Help Asset Allocation

Limiting account percentage with Robinhood Template Algo

The Robinhood algo, here: https://www.quantopian.com/posts/robinhood-live-trading-update-stop-waiting-3-days-with-robinhood-instant , uses this,

         # We will weight each asset equally and leave a 5% cash reserve.  
         context.weight = 0.95 / len(context.assets)

to equally distribute funds throughout the list of assets in our context. I would like to make this work with a Large cash reserve and a Small investment to limit my risk.

I've set the account starting amount at $26,000 and changed the context.weight = .038 to invest ~$1,000 of my cash. However, this results in having 0% returns throughout. I've also played with this and it seems like the magic number is around .25; so when I set context.weight = .25 , then I get returns, BUT not at .2

Does anyone know what is going on here? I would really like to not invest 25% of $25,000 at my first live algo attempt! hah...
(I have other questions/concerns about going live, but I will probably ask those in another thread)

Any ideas or workarounds are appreciated.

3 responses

The culprit is in the 'order_for_robinhood' method. There is a check to see if the amount to order is within 1% of the target. Since you start with such a small amount this check fails. It's commented out in the attached algorithm. There may be other issues but that one was the first I found.

    if abs(percent_to_order) < .01:  
        return

It's possible that your orders are being rounded down. You can't buy partial shares so for example, if you had $100 and wanted to use 1% of that to buy $100/share, you'll order nothing! I would advise to make an order function that manually targets a certain amount of shares instead of a target percent.

Christopher Chalfant

Okay. Thank you both. I'll look into those and see if it helps.

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The material on this website is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell, a solicitation to buy, or a recommendation or endorsement for any security or strategy, nor does it constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services by Quantopian.

In addition, the material offers no opinion with respect to the suitability of any security or specific investment. No information contained herein should be regarded as a suggestion to engage in or refrain from any investment-related course of action as none of Quantopian nor any of its affiliates is undertaking to provide investment advice, act as an adviser to any plan or entity subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as amended, individual retirement account or individual retirement annuity, or give advice in a fiduciary capacity with respect to the materials presented herein. If you are an individual retirement or other investor, contact your financial advisor or other fiduciary unrelated to Quantopian about whether any given investment idea, strategy, product or service described herein may be appropriate for your circumstances. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal. Quantopian makes no guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the views expressed in the website. The views are subject to change, and may have become unreliable for various reasons, including changes in market conditions or economic circumstances.