Frequently Asked Questions

We take protecting your intellectual property very seriously. We limit the access to the database to key team member who need it, and ensure they have no conflict of interest from trading on our personal accounts.

For those especially concerned we have open sourced the LEAN engine, allowing you to do algorithmic trading entirely on your own servers - proving we're truly trying to empower your trading.

Learning quantitative trading is especially difficult as there is so little public information available. We have sought to address this through the educational materials we make available. We provide a Bootcamp for those unfamiliar with programming or trading concepts, a series of tutorials on implementing a quantitative strategy, and our YouTube channel which is intended to guide you on using the QC API. Inside the Algorithm Lab have the QC University which is a collection of 100+ demonstration algorithms to help you get started.

The QuantConnect community and the algorithms they share are also a great way to get started. There are thousands of members just like yourself who share their journey.

We do not have any plans to build a visual algorithm designer. We believe the only way to make money in the markets is with the most powerful, flexible tools available. We recently designed the Algorithm Framework which allows relatively easily assembly of coding blocks to design an algorithm but you still need to have a strong foundation in code. Its this belief which has powered many of the design decisions behind QuantConnect. We were algorithmic traders ourselves for 3 years and built hundreds of algorithms. They ranged from the simple, to incredibly complex. The common theme among them was the need for flexibility which can only be achieved through raw code.

See a full list of white listed libraries in our Documentation/Supported Libraries section.

If your library is not there and you want it added please let us know.

We support live trading with Interactive Brokers, Alpaca, GDAX, FXCM, OANDA, and Bitfinex. We also allow you to do paper trading with Equity, Crypto, Forex and CFD data.

We work hard to make QuantConnect free for everyone to use. Since education has always been a core value, live trading is free for all students logging in with a .edu address. For everyone else, we have sponsorships from brokerages that want to attract your trading and hedge funds that want to offer you investment. In addition we charge a small fee for infrastructure upgrades such as more powerful live servers and RAM upgrades.

There can never be any guarantee of security with online websites as we've seen over and over again in recent years. However we deploy all modern and common security procedures. We deploy nightly software updates to keep the server up to date with the latest security patches. We used SSH key login to avoid reliance on passwords.

Your code is stored in a database, isolated from the internet. When the code leaves the database it is compiled and obfuscated before being deployed to the cloud. If the cloud servers were compromised this makes it difficult to read your strategy.

Internally we use processes to ensure only a handful of people have access to the database; and always restrict logins to never use root credentials.

We believe in making the best possible automated investment tools available to everyone. By leveling the playing fields in the financial markets we can bring about a new, automated era of investment management.

We are a community of algorithmic engineers, data scientists, statisticians, coders, geeks and scientists who enjoy modelling and trading in the financial markets.

With the QuantConnect Algorithm Lab users can design algorithmic trading strategies and trade them on their personal brokerage accounts. You write code directly into your browser, compile your algorithm, and then send it to be backtested. The backtesting cloud is the most powerful in the world, second only to major banks and hedgefunds. We can spin up hundreds of CPUs to ensure your algorithm completes in a few minutes.

Our technology was based from our personal experience. We founded an algorithmic fund and traded high frequency strategies live for 2 years. This powerful infrastructure has been tested with millions of dollars of trading volume, and thousands of backtests. It was built for speed to ensure the fastest design iterations possible.

To change your password go here when you're logged in.

If you have forgotten your password you can reset it here.

If you have forgotten your password head to our Reset Password page. Here you can enter your email address and we will send you a link to reset your password.

QuantConnect offers Equity, Forex, Futures, Options, Crypto, and CFD data for you to backtest. We also offer Morning Star data for doing fundamental analysis. You can see a full list of the data providers in the Data Library.

For most data sources we offer data resolution down to the tick with the exception of Options data, which is so large we can only offer minute bars.

We're always looking for more data sets and are adding them all the time. Due to the high investment required for any dataset we have to make sure its useful and interesting for a majority of the community. If you would like to import a data set we don't currently support you can use the Custom Data feature to backtest on any data source.

Thanks to FXCM and OANDA we are able to provide FX and CFD for free to download through the Data Library. Cryptocurrency data is available for sale, but because of other data provider restrictions we are not able to resell Equity, Futures or Options data. When downloading data from QuantConnect we just ask a small fee to cover the bandwidth cost.

By default our data is adjusted. This means we account for the splits and dividends in the data and create an adjusted price. You can disable this by selecting "Raw" mode for the data which pays dividends as cash and directly applies splits to your account. Read more about adjusted data.

QuantConnect builds our TradeBars from tick data. While doing this we filter out ticks which our vendor believes are "suspicious". These suspicious trades include ones which are rolled back, reported late, or traded via OTC markets. This makes the bars a more realistic representation of the asset price but it might vary slightly from popular web-portals like Yahoo etc. Although this results in slightly different prices we believe its more important to have realistic backtests than match Yahoo.

Alpha Streams is a platform for quants to offer their algorithms to funds for licensing in a secure and scalable way. By connecting through QuantConnect we can protect the IP of the quant; and distribute the trading signals to the funds to apply in their portfolio.

An Alpha is the core signal creation module of your algorithm. The alpha predicts the expected return in the coming moments of time. Alpha's predict the direction of the price curve, and ideally the magnitude of the movement.

To make robust algorithm development easier, QuantConnect developed a solid infrastructure called the QuantConnect Framework. This framework forms the foundation for a good quantitative strategy and comprises of 5 modules: portfolio selection, alpha creation, portfolio construction, execution and risk management.

1. 1) Make sure you're registered with a QuantConnect account as an Alpha Author.
2. 2) Go to the Alpha Market submission page.
3. 3) Submit your alpha with the universe tagged.