Daily mode gives you a quick rough estimate of whether or not your trading idea is adequate to research further. In the real world you have to chose what time of day to do a trade. Minute mode provides a reasonable time resolution to execute trades on fresh data. I suppose Quantopian could chose what time of day for you but why would want them to? The code below converts minute mode to daily.

if get_datetime().hour != 14 and get_datetime().minute != 31:  
        # Run only @ 9:31 AM to execute order (time zone UTC)  

Why can't we have a Live tradeable quick rough estimate of your idea? :-)

I am just wondering what we would lose by having the daily model, that uses minute data at a specific well defined time like you have above.
It doesnt have to be slow, can be of the same speed as the current daily model if done right behind the scenes.

Sarvi

This code snippet:

if get_datetime().hour != 14 and get_datetime().minute != 31:  
    # Run only @ 9:31 AM to execute order (time zone UTC)

gets the basic idea, but just to be entirely clear, it's not perfect. In particular, it doesn't account for Daylight Saving Time, and it doesn't account for the fact that depending on how liquid your stocks are, you may not get an event at exactly 9:31am every day.

You could do something like this instead:

def initialize(context):  
    context.today = None

def handle_data(context, data):  
    if get_datetime().date() == context.today:  
        return  
    context.today = get_datetime().date()  
    # Do your algo logic here.