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Is this a glitch?

If you change any variable to my code the return percentage goes down dramatically. Did I just find a sweet spot or is it a glitch?

4 responses

Hi Joseph,

It appears as though your algorithm is borrowing money at an unrealistic weight. On Quantopian, an algorithm is not restricted to spending its starting capital. To control the amount of money you spend, you will need to manage your ordering manually. The backtest is showing an extremely high return because the returns are calculated relative to the starting capital.

Does this help?

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So by using " get_open_orders() " it would restrict the spending to only the starting capital?

Hi Joseph,

If you use order_target_percent to order securities up to 100% of your portfolio in absolute weight, and you only place these orders when you don't have any open orders, then yes, it will restrict your algo to only spend the starting capital.

To elaborate on what I mean by "order securities up to 100% of your portfolio in absolute weight", you essentially need the absolute sum of all your target weights to add up to 1. I would recommend going through the Getting Started Tutorial from start to finish as it will walk you through what you need to know. The example in the final lesson manually limits its leverage.

That makes more sense, thanks so much!!