Hi Satya,

Not that I'm aware of :). The last couple of months, we have been focused on adding new datasets to Pipeline. We're hoping to have some announcements to make soon. Stay tuned!

@Jamie,

I am glad to hear that. But it is just lack of activities in the Community and now cancellation of QuantCon give us the impression that the platform is dying.

In my view the forum is simply no longer interesting in the way that is was. Quantopian is focussing on a single strategy which is of no interest to most of us in that it requires gearing and far too much capital. In addition we can not use Quantopian to trade that or anything else for ourselves.

Their educational material is excellent but becomes increadingly irrelevant when there is nothing you can do with it.

The chances of winning and retaining an allocation of Axelrod's capital is also slim to non existent and in any event the secrecy surrounding the whole process makes it a fairly pointless guessing game.

I repeat the software and educational material is superb but it can be put to no useful purpose for the vast majority of us.

@Zenothestoic

I 100% agree. The research-backtest-(live trading) here at Quantopian is one of the best.

The pipeline makes the whole process smooth.

Unfortunately, the contest itself is not attractive enough for most of users. Without user participation, where is the crowd in crowd-sourcing?

And I wonder why they cancelled QuantCon this year. I was really looking forward to it... so sad...

Hope the new announcement would include paying for live trading just like what Quantconnect doing.
And I think that would bring back people to the community as old times.

I think the big necessity is to see some reward. As you say one method of "reward" is to allow to to connect to a broker to make money from your own systems. This may satisfy some and certainly made for a lively forum where people were constantly inventing systems they hoped would shoot the lights out.

The second way was/is offering a reward for producing code or systems Quantopian can use to trade for Bobby Axelrod or whatever.

The latter option is a lot more problematic. The high likelihood is that most forum participants will waste hundreds or even thousands of hours and probably won't get a system accepted. Even if they do they may not make much of a return since Quantopian will drop the algo as soon as it ceases to meet their criteria.

I think it is a problematic business model. Quantopian is certainly offering great value to those who simply ebay to learn some rudiments of quantitative finance, systematic trading and Python + libraries. For beginners it's a great opportunity and learning curve.

For those of us who do not need to climb a learning curve the benefits are far less obvious.

Why was quantcon cancelled? I never received an explanation despite 5 attempts to communicate.

Hi Daniel,

I'm sorry we didn't get back to you. We shared a post on our decision to postpone QuantCon back in early March. I am personally a huge fan of QuantCon and it was a tough decision for us to make, ultimately however we determined that we needed to postpone the event in order to prioritize our focus on delivering new data and tools as well as on growing the number of algorithms included into our investment strategy.

You can reach out to me anytime with other questions that come up at [email protected]

Hmmm thank you. It is an explanation at least albeit a weak one that sounds fake. The email I received said "postponed indefinitely." And one doesn't sign for a conference space, confirm speakers and workshops to cancel an event for "focus on tools."

@Daniel I believe it is rescheduled to Q4 2019 or Q1 2020, as they wanted to focus on the platform, adding new data sources etc. It wasn't that long ago that they received investment from Point72, and as more and more algorithms are funded there's a lot more work to be done.

@Zeno Agreed. The streamlined development process is one of the defining features of Q, and is amazing from an educational perspective. After a certain point however, users have an incentive to either move into a quantitative finance career track with the experience (if they are near a major financial center such as NY) or develop on alternative platforms. The lack of "rewards" as you mentioned is a key factor here, for example the option of live trading would allow for some validation/feedback after countless hours of work - especially if the algorithm is not quite up to funding standards (which is very specific to Q's investment portfolio).