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Negative returns at the very beginning of backtest period.

There is something that I do not understand with Quantopian plots. In some cases when I run a backtest, looking at the plot, the return is negative at the beginning of the backtest period. Shouldn't return be zero at the very beginning? Can someone please help me understand these plots?

Thanks
Babak

1 response

Plots of your end-of-day equity. If you start your algorithm on Oct 31 and it buys/sells stocks during the day, by the end of day you will likely have made some gains or losses.