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jumps to 10 leverage immediately on backtest

leverage goes out of control, please help

2 responses

Charles I took a look at your code. You have two significant problems in your logic that is affecting your leverage.

  1. In line 36, you do an order_target_percent with a target of 50%. You have a list of 186 securities. Unless you add additional logic, you could order up to 186 X 50% = 93000%, or 93X leverage. One strategy is to order just the first two, and stay at 100% that way. What is probably smarter is to figure out how many stocks you want to own, call it N, and then order 100%/N of each of them.
  2. You put your ordering code in handle_data which means it will run every minute. If you do that (which is rarely a good idea!) then you also need to check for open orders. By blindly ordering every minute, you can stack order upon order and when they all fill later, they will blow up your leverage.

Separately, you have record in handle_data(). You should move that into a scheduled function and call it once per day. You'll get much faster backtests that way.

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thank you