I think all of us here want to see Quantopian be successful in every way, especially financially, to ensure that we can all benefit from it.

As Quantopian moves toward live trading, there are some opportunities that we in the community can help bring to light, to help out. I have listed a few here, below. None are perfect, but they can serve as a starting point for improvement.

My intent for this thread is to be used as a "suggestion box" for ways that Quantopian can increase profitability, reduce costs, and mitigate risks as it moves toward live trading. Please share your helpful insights here!

1. To access the largest customer base, multiple B/Ds should be made available. This is not just to give Quantopian users access to a lot of B/Ds, but is to give many more investors (who are not yet Quantopian users) access to Quantopian. Exempli grati, One of my mentors is on the board directors with a B/D, and after I told him about it, he has expressed interest in being able to use Quantopian as a service for all of their clients. Other more traditional B/Ds could as well offer managed accounts with Quantopian trading as an opportunity to better serve their customers. Still other "DIY" discount B/Ds (who market to hands-on traders) could offer Quantopian as another selling feature. All of these different B/Ds together could encourage the customer base of Quantopian to greatly increase.

(Voluntary disclosure: I personally would like to have access to multiple B/Ds because when liquidating substantially large blocks of stock in various companies it is necessary to spread the sells out over multiple market makers so as not to give the appearance that the stock is about to come crashing down due to one large seller)

1. To mitigate investor liability, a series of safeguards should be established.
   

A. Lets face it, eventually some white trash idiot is going to have a mistake in his code, and is going to blow his life savings of $20,000, and then file complaints with the SEC and with FINRA, and with the NASD, and then hire the law firm from the TV commercials, "Did you lose money in the stock market? Call now to win the lifestyle you deserve." I'm sure that Quantopian's compliance guy has already prepared disclaimers and the usual legal crap, but it may also be a good idea to add some sort of mandatory "babysitting code" that will prevent people from doing some of the typical top 10 most common mistakes to deplete your entire account instantly. For the pros, this could be disabled with a question such as, "This setting will allow you to lose your entire account instantly, are you sure you want to proceed?" My experience is that most of the idiot customers all have the same stupid problems, and these few bad apples out of a larger bunch of good customers are also responsible for 90% of all of the time-consuming, unprofitable, customer service issues. The more the system can be stupid-proofed, the less likely there are to be furious people filing complaints.

B. Another safeguard would be to require the successful completion of some minimum amount of backtesting before a customer is allowed to go live.

1. An incentive plan should be implemented to help popularize viral growth Some plan for incentives that cost the company nothing should be created to help the company expand its customer base. For example, there are numerous dealmakers on the Street, who have the skills, power, and reputation to be able to sway entire family offices, managed accounts, private equity funds, et cetera, to move at once. They could be offered a 50% discount on their own purchases, up to some sizeable portion of the profits generated. This is a win-win approach, because it would increase the bottom line of Quantopian, and the "payment" is no payment at all, but is actually earning more money from the dealmaker who feels inclined to "take advantage" of his discount, lest it go to waste. I learned this principal as a kid, when I saw the arcade game companies offer 3 games for 2 quarters. They aren't really giving up anything, because the electronics are already equity sitting there on the arcade floor, and they end up getting 2 quarters out of the kid rather than 1.