First off welcome. Any particular reason you can't or do not want to run Quantopian/Zipline through your browser? Quantopian offers everything free in their hosted environment. No setup required.

Unless you have some compelling reason to load zipline locally (ie the open source code which runs the Quantopian backtester) I'd strongly recommend using the online version provided by Quantopian. No need to install anything. Just run from your browser. A couple of issues you will have with a local install is getting a source for data and then not being able to easily post to the forums here.

If your end goal is to trade retail with your own money, you've come to the wrong place (although if I understand correctly, the Quantopian Emerging Managers Program might provide some overlap of interests, and you could still do R&D for free on Quantopian). You might check out http://www.zipline-live.io/ and its Slack channel.

If you are interested in participating in the Quantopian contest and supporting its crowd-sourced hedge fund (1337 Street Fund), then you've come to the right place, and I agree with Dan's direction above.

It all depends on what you want to do.

Hello William,

The package you are trying to install is not maintained nor developed by Quantopian. I would recommend you opening an issue on the Github repository you linked above to get help from the developer directly.

As Dan mentioned, the easiest way to get started developing algorithms is to use your browser to access Quantopian's online platform, which is free to use. Quantopian provides access to minute frequency pricing data, as well as fully integrated backtesting and research environments. Check out our Getting Started tutorial for some examples on how to use the platform to develop your first algorithm.

If you want to develop strategies offline on your own IDE, you can install Zipline (the open source backtester powering Quantopian). Zipline comes with a daily frequency pricing dataset sourced from Quandl's WIKI Prices. The downside of this approach is that if you require additional data (minute frequency pricing, for example), you need to provide it yourself.

I hope this helps.

Hi William, did you ever find a solution

JJ, I am not William and I cannot answer as to whether or not he sought a solution.

However, I am very new to this type of trading. Though I have been programming for about a year and have had an interest in finance for 3ish years, I'm ready to take my trading to the next level by incorporating the two fields. Maybe you could push me in the right direction as to where to start. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the quantopian platform. Is it simply a platform to practice on or is it the real thing? Is anything like IBpy2? hopefully, you can elaborate and maybe even link some helpful links or videos.

best,

Quantopian is both, you can use it to just practice your trades on their IDE or you can submit and get entered into a contest.

In order to fix this you must change the line from pip.req import parse_requirements in the setup.py file to:

try: # for pip >= 10  
    from pip._internal.req import parse_requirements  
except ImportError: # for pip <= 9.0.3  
    from pip.req import parse_requirements  

The reason is it is an issue of how pip handles installs between v9> vs. v10+

I am getting the below error after updating the script.

C:\Users\Python35>python setup.py install

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "setup.py", line 60, in
session=False)],
File "setup.py", line 59, in
install_requires=[str(x.req) for x in parse_requirements('requirements/insta
ll-py%d.txt' % py_version,
AttributeError: 'ParsedRequirement' object has no attribute 'req'