Traders may now enhance their experience by leveraging trading solutions via the latest Alpaca and QuantConnect integration.
Alpaca is pleased to announce its integration with QuantConnect, an algorithmic trading platform “chosen by thousands of professional traders and quants.” Using this integration, Alpaca users can “design, backtest, and trade algorithmic strategies within minutes for supported asset classes including stocks, ETFs, options and cryptocurrencies.”
Founded in 2012, QuantConnect has built “an online algorithmic research and trading platform where you can build strategies by leveraging its Python API. QuantConnect serves more than 300,000 members and executes $5B in notional trading volumes each month.”
Traditionally, quants and engineers face “the painstaking process of building quantitative trading architectures.”
This process can take months or even years, “involving the writing of data processing systems, live trading data feeds, and trade routers — expensive engineering that adds little direct value to your trading strategy.”
With QuantConnect, you can go from idea to “live trading in minutes.” All the core plumbing is implemented in “a best-practices, highly configurable environment.”
The core of QuantConnect’s technology is “called LEAN, a fully open-source algorithmic trading engine that manages your strategy and data feeds.”
This partnership with Alpaca includes “the open-sourcing and maintenance of the LEAN-Alpaca plugin, enabling anyone to fork the code base and extend it as they see fit. And this open source soul fully aligns with Alpaca’s DNA.”
You can easily access this plugin through “the LEAN CLI with a simple command: pip install lean.”
The Alpaca and QuantConnect integration “enables live commission-free trading support for stocks, equity options, and ETFs.”
Traders can utilize hundreds of terabytes of data “hosted by QuantConnect and then quickly execute trades in the Alpaca paper or live trading environments.”
QuantConnect’s live trading is hosted “on their own co-located hardware, rather than a dedicated server.”
This helps them maintain long uptimes “with fully redundant internet and data feeds. For equities, the full SIP data feed is available, allowing your strategies to scan all 8,000 stocks of the US market for opportunities.”
The data is simply delivered to your algorithm “cleaned and ready for your analysis.”
Jared Broad, CEO at QuantConnect said:
“Alpaca is regularly a pioneer in high-tech API trading. We’re proud to be announcing support for an end-to-end Alpaca Brokerage integration and delivering $0-fee trading.”
Hitoshi Harada, Co-Founder and CPO at Alpaca said:
“We are excited about this partnership as we appreciate how much QuantConnect contributes to the evolution of quant research and trading. We will build the community and advance the technology around it together.”
You are able to invest in over 11,000 stocks, ETFs, and options “with zero commission using your Alpaca account directly in QuantConnect.”
Options trading is not suitable for “all investors due to its inherent high risk, which can potentially result in significant losses.”