Dear Community,

Today we're welcoming new members from the Quantopian community after the platform announced its shutdown. QuantConnect was founded a few months apart from Quantopian, so we have some kinship and understanding of the growing pains they've gone through over the years. We're grateful for those choosing to migrate to QuantConnect to continue their quant journey.

Code Migration:

We are working on an uploader tool to take the code exported from Quantopian and make it available in QuantConnect projects. It will be ready later today and will automatically create projects in Zipline format in QC accounts. This will not yet perform code modifications to make the code work! This will need to be a manual process for now but we have an awesome support team to help you convert your code.

Migration Documentation

We have started writing a dedicated section of the documentation for the Zipline/Quantopian migrating users. You can see this documentation here, to learn the core differences in the concepts of the platforms. We highly highly recommend starting with Boot Camp. It will guide you line by line on how to build algorithms in QuantConnect with accompanying videos. We've spent a year making these tutorials and they're all entirely free.

Business Sustainability

We know you'll be keenly sensitive to the ongoing viability of your next host. Unlike Quantopian, we've taken relatively little funding and therefore have control over the direction of the business. We have designed QuantConnect and LEAN to be nimble, responsive, and light-weight. Our products have a free tier for people to explore, but "high-power" resources have a cost associated - this keeps the business viable. You'll find this on-par or cheaper than AWS - we've done that on purpose. We've engineered our systems on dedicated hardware that performs 30-50% faster than AWS, and because it's dedicated we can save costs in aggregate for you.

We've also written guides for those who want a back-up anyway. In this post, Avoiding Vendor Lock-In, we provide a step-by-step guide on how to run your own LEAN server. It will not be easy -- what we do is incredibly hard and expensive -- but you have the freedom to choose your host. We hope you'll choose us =).

Bug Reports

We try and focus the community on constructive algorithm discussion. It is not a great bug tracking tool and just creates noise - please post to support@quantconnect.com if you have bug reports.

Data Issues

We post our data issues transparently and solicit the community for help in locating and fixing the data. Please post data issues to the Data Explorer if you have any issues. This way other community members can see the issue and we can notify you when the issue is fixed. We also have built technology that automatically processes these issues and attempts to fix them.

Feature Requests

Please post to this thread. We're going to do our best to fast track the Zipline features you've come to depend on in the next 48 hours. 

I know it's going to be a rough week, but hang in there the whole team at QuantConnect is working as fast as possible to make this a smooth experience for you. We're genuinely here to provide the best experience and opportunities for you as possible!

Best,

Jared

677_1604003990.jpg

Author

Jared Broad

October 2020