Hi - is there anyway to expand the security_lists? Currently only seems to leveraged etf's only. Can it be expanded to include volatility etfs and other various etfs based on investment strategy/geography etc. Currently I manually omit them from my universe but was wondering if there is a more effective method.

http://etf.stock-encyclopedia.com/category/volatility-index-(vix)-etfs.html

Is there a way to drop security_lists.leveraged_etf_list from the universe itself.

This will also exclude them from the algo crunching their numbers before coming to
ordering stage.

I posted this request earlier

If we have an algo running in the contest, should we stop the algo (after hours) to add this line?

It seems that adding set_do_not_order_list(security_lists.leveraged_etf_list) in initialize() does not protect the algo from trading leveraged ETFs. I added it as the 1st line of initialize() and my algo is still DQ'd from contest. While fetcher-based algos are no longer accepted after this month, my submission uses fetcher and sets the universe with that data - perhaps something like Yagnesh's idea needs to be implemented to keep such algos from being DQd?

You would need 2 parts in your code to protect against trading leveraged ETFs:

1. Set the trading guard (line 7 in the example above)
   
2. Check if the security is a leveraged ETF before trading (line 14 in the example above)

Yagnesh, I had missed your suggestion earlier! I like that idea and we'll see how to add it in the API.

@Alisa,

This solution does not seem to be working well. It just throws an exception and does not let the backtest complete. It would be better if the rule actually just skipped over the security and allowed the backtest to complete. Can you confirm this is how it is currently set up to work?

Here is the exception:
TradingControlViolation

There was a runtime error on line 136.
Order for -2532 shares of Equity(39898 [GASL]) at 2016-01-04 14:31:00+00:00 violates trading constraint set_do_not_order_list.

John, if i'm reading this correctly, you can replace "log.info("%s is an over-leveraged ETF, not purchasing" % (sec.symbol)))" with "pass" and that should just quietly ignore the problem.

I wrote a CustomFactor to exclude leveraged ETFs from pipeline results. Now when we are in Q2 and there no longer is universe this (or similar solution) is probably optimal;

https://www.quantopian.com/posts/how-to-exclude-leveraged-etfs-from-pipeline-results