At QuantConnect, we have helped thousands of budding quants over the years. Our algorithm development terminal is a powerful backtesting platform that allows members to design strategies on 15 years of past equities data. 

We see several widespread mistakes in even the most basic strategies. For our latest free video tutorial – Coding the Exponential Moving Average Strategy - we wanted to start by helping users avoid these common mistakes and show how to prevent them. These common mistakes are: 

1. Debounce your Algorithm – Increase your algorithm efficiency by ensuring it only fires once per trading signal. 

2. Single Trigger per Signal – Tightly manage cash flow and trigger orders optimally by ensuring algorithms only send orders once per signal. 

3. Reduce Variables and Avoid Optimization – Be wary of curve fitting and high parameter counts to make your algorithm look profitable on past data. Check out their tutorial video with the coding walk-through and how to avoid these common mistakes when building a strategy.

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