

This is especially useful if you plan to use the built-in indicators offered by the platform. Live Trading – If you’re happy with your backtesting results, it is easy to migrate to a live environment within Backtrader. Further, with a wide user base, there is also active third-party development. Just a few weeks ago, a pandas-based technical analysis library was released to address issues in the popular and commonly used TA-Lib framework. The framework was originally developed in 2015 and constant improvements have been made since then. It forced many users to migrate to a different platform which can be cumbersome.Īctive Development – This might be one area where Backtrader especially stands out. A good example of this is when Quantopian discontinued live trading a few years ago.

#Thinktrader backtesting upgrade
You’re not obligated to upgrade and deal with unwanted changes as you might with software from a corporation.There’s no need to upload your strategy to a third-party server which eases concerns over confidentiality.
#Thinktrader backtesting full
#Thinktrader backtesting how to
Rather than trying to figure out the math behind the indicator, and how to code it, you can test it out first in Backtrader, probably with one line of code. This is especially useful if you want to test out an indicator but you’re not sure how effective it will be. Indicators – Most of the popular indicators are already programmed in the Backtrader platform. A complex chart can be created with a single line of code. Plotting – If you’ve worked with a few Python plotting libraries, you’ll know these are not always easy to configure, especially the first time around. After running a backtest, optimizing is easily done by changing a few lines of code. Optimizing – Adjusting a few parameters can sometimes be the difference between a profitable strategy and an unprofitable one. It has built-in templates to use for various data sources to make importing data easier. Here are some of the things Backtrader excels at:īacktesting – This might seem like an obvious one but Backtrader removes the tedious process of cleaning up your data and iterating through it to test strategies. Further, the extensive documentation on Backtrader’s website might even lead to the discovery of a crucial component for your strategy. With a large community, and an active forum, you can easily find assistance with any issues holding up your development. Using Backtrader can save you countless hours of writing code to test out market strategies. Further, it can be used to optimize strategies, create visual plots, and can even be used for live trading. It is an open-source framework that allows for strategy testing on historical data. How to save backtest data to a CSV fileīacktrader is a Python library that aids in strategy development and testing for traders of the financial markets.How to use alternative data in Backtrader.How to build a stock screener in Backtrader.How to use the built-in crossover indicator.How to print or log data using the strategy class in Backtrader.How to get data and import it into Backtrader.How to configure the basic Backtrader setup.Choosing which IDE to use with Backtrader.In this article, we will focus on Backtrader. There are 2 popular libraries for backtesting. (After you become an algorithmic trading expert, you can consider option 2 if the current available solutions don’t fulfill your needs.) It gets the job done fast and everything is safely stored on your local computer. If you want to backtest a trading strategy using Python, you can 1) run your backtests with pre-existing libraries, 2) build your own backtester, or 3) use a cloud trading platform.
