MCP Server

To connect the Agent in the Cursor IDE to the QC MCP Server, follow these steps:

1. Install and open Cursor.
2. In the top navigation bar, click View > Extensions.
3. In the Search Exensions in Marketplace field, enter QuantConnect.
4. Click Install.
5. In the primary side bar, click the QuantConnect icon.
6. In the Initialization Checklist panel, click Login to QuantConnect.

7. In the Cursor window, click Open.

8. On the Code Extension Login page, click Grant Access.
9. In the Select Workspace panel, click Pull Organization Workspace.

10. In the Pull QuantConnect Organization Workspace window, click the cloud workspace (organization) that you want to pull.

11. In the Pull QuantConnect Organization Workspace window, create a directory to serve as the organization workspace and then click Select.


It takes a few minutes to create a new organization workspace directory and populate it with the the initial file structure. After the organization workspace is populated with the initial file structure, it pulls your cloud project files.

12. In your ~ / .cursor / mcp.json file, add the following configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "qc-mcp": {
      "url": "http://localhost:3001/",
      "transport": {
        "type": "Streamable HTTP"
      }
    }
  }
}

13. In Cursor, create a new project or open an existing one.
14. In the top navigation bar, click File > Preferences > Cursor Settings.
15. On the Cursor Settings page, click Tools & MCP.
16. If the QC MCP Server has an error, click the toggle switch twice to restart it.

17. Press Ctrl+Alt+b to chat with the agent.

To backtest and live trade with the local Deployment Target, install Docker Desktop. The installation process depends on if your machine uses Windows, macOS, or Linux.

Cursor supports several LLMs that you can use in the Chat panel, including GPT, Claude, and Gemini. To change the model, click the model name at the bottom of the Chat panel and then click the name of the model to use.

To view all the available models, see Models in the Cursor documentation.

There are no quotas on the QuantConnect API, but Cursor and the LLMs have some. To view the quotas, see Pricing in the Cursor documentation and see the quotas of the model you use.

The following sections explain some issues you may encounter and how to resolve them.

No Tools Available

If the agent can't access the tools of the MCP Server, follow these steps to restart the server:

1. In the top navigation bar of Cursor, click File > Preferences > Cursor Settings.
2. On the Cursor Settings page, click Tools & MCP.
3. Next to the qc-mcp server, click the toggle switch twice to restart it.

Service Outages

The MCP server relies on the QuantConnect API and the client application. To check the status of the QuantConnect API, see our Status page. To check the status of Cursor, see the Cursor Status page. To check the status of the LLM, see its status page. For example, Claude users can see the Anthropic Status page.

Other Issues

For more information about troubleshooting the MCP server in Cursor, see Agent in the Cursor documentation.

The following examples demonstrate the MCP server with Cursor.

Example 1: Hello World

To test the server and client are working and connected, enter the following prompt into the Cursor chat:

> Read the open project.

The agent should call the read_open_project tool.

Example 2: Strategy Development and Deployment

This example uses the Cursor Agent to brainstorm new strategy ideas, edit files, run backtests, and deploy to paper trading.