As some may know, on October 29th, Quantopian users received notification the company would be terminating its free community platform on November 14th, leaving users with two weeks to download their code and find another home. 


We understand this closure has come suddenly, leaving many quants adrift. While we know not all will migrate to Quantconnect, our goal with this post is to let the community know what we are doing to ease the transition for users that choose to use our ecosystem. 

There are a few steps we put into motion immediately upon hearing of the displacement of Quantopian users. First, we began work on an uploader tool that takes code exported from Quantopian and makes it available in QuantConnect projects. It will automatically create projects in Zipline format in QC accounts. Performing modifications to make the code work will need to be a manual process for now — but as our community can attest, we have an awesome support team to help you convert code. 

Alongside this tool, we began writing a dedicated documentation section for users coming from  Zipline/Quantopian. This is in addition to existing, extensive documentation explaining the platform’s infrastructure. We highly, highly recommend starting with Boot Camp (also on Udemy). It will guide you line by line on how to build algorithms in QuantConnect with accompanying videos. We spent a year making these tutorials and they're all entirely free. 

We know that losing a favorite trading platform can be a distressing situation. For those concerned about business viability and the future, our business model emphasizes stability in the long-term. While we offer a free tier to explore all of our products, we charge monthly fees for resource-intensive services — similar to AWS — to keep our business viable. Furthermore, we have taken relatively little outside capital and thus have more control over our business’ future. 

This will be a hectic time for many, but know that we have a track record of putting quants first. We continued live trading support — even as others moved in different directions — as we knew our community valued it highly; we created the Alpha Streams marketplace so users can get their algos licensed; and we built our Organizations feature so that users can grow and scale alongside us. 

Many things may be changing right now, but QuantConnect’s dedication to its users is not one of them! 

Happy Coding, 

Team @ QuantConnect