Some questions came in on an old thread, and rather than clutter up the old one.
Gary asked:
Dreaming, suppose I help develop the most awesome trading algo ever.
Just wondering what reasons there might be that I might want to keep
it under my hat. If others were to use the code too (and maybe improve
on it further), and make a lot of money along with me, can that
conceivably have a positive (or negative) effect on the market in
general, or on my trades? (Imagine a lot of people using the exact
same code hypothetically, although in the real world there would most
likely be little tweaks differentiating them to some degree, human
nature).
There are strategies when it would be helpful for others to follow your trades. What you clearly would never want is for everyone to jump in right in front of you and drive your prices up. A lot of people think of this in terms of "capacity" - how much capital can my strategy handle before it distorts the prices and makes the strategy ineffective? I don't expect anyone to publicize the code of their super-lucrative algorithm. The community has great content, but no one is going to publish the blueprints for their gold-making machine.
Gary #2:
There was some talk of privacy above, if I were to share my algorithm
with Quantopian as well, maybe they might like to use for themselves
and reap a lot of income too and then maybe that could benefit all of
us with lower (eventual, when that happens here) live trading fees for
example?
As a company, we're not looking at algorithms, and we're not trading algorithms. The scenario you describe would have a lot of conflict of interest for us. We don't want to put ourselves in a place where our customers' interests conflict with our own; we want to align our interests so we make money when our customers make money.
David Question1.
In live trading, will all algos be connected to the same IB account?
Will, there be a minimum amount of $ that each algo has to be trading
or is the minimum amount at the account level and can be split up
between as many algos as we see fit. It would be nice to be able to
live-test with small sums of $ for a while before going full throttle.
In the current implementation, a given IB account can have only one live algorithm running against it. If you want to run more than one algorithm, you need to create IB sub-accounts, and have one Quantopian algorithm for each sub-account. We won't impose an account minimum, but IB would.
David Question2.
Does Quantopian have plans to make some standardized simple orders?
For example, If I wanted to buy 10 shares of Apple, it doesn't make
sense to run an algo that just buys on the first day and does nothing
ever again. Generators could be useful for these types of one time
orders.
That particular feature isn't in our roadmap at this point. If you're doing something that is pure buy-and-hold, the IB interface already does that pretty easily. You'd start using Quantopian if you are trying to do something more active, like rotating where you are long. Am I missing a use case there that you can help me understand?
