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Comment by krapht | Hacker News Reader

Quantopian won't be free forever. It seems the fees they are thinking of charging going into the future will mean that it only makes sense for active traders who derive value from Quantopian's market research and backtesting facilities.

I recommend using Interactive Brokers and coding your algorithm against their API directly, skipping the Quantopian middleman.

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Quantopian's revenue model is to build a hedge fund and charge the fund investors returns/management fees. The algorithms in the hedge fund come from the Quantopian community. We work with the best algorithm writers on our platform, negotiate compensation, and then put their code to work.

We would be crazy to charge people to use our platform. We need thousands of algorithms, and charging for the platform would be one of the faster ways to kill our business.

Yes, you can code to Interactive Broker's API. But where would you get your free minute historical data for backtesting? Or corporate fundamentals data? Or the free IPython research environment? Or the community of 60,000 quants giving each other mentoring and advice?

I work at Quantopian, so you can imagine my answer to all of those questions.

In fairness, your (commendably candid) FAQ states the precise opposite "In the future we plan to charge for live trading, when you trade your algorithms through your brokerage account"

Time to go update the FAQ! The business plan changed in October '14 - evidently we missed that reference.

FAQ still reads:

Is Quantopian free? Quantopian's community and backtester is free for everyone to use. There will be a charge for connecting your algorithm to your brokerage. Pricing isn't finalized, but we're considering a flat monthly fee.

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