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Comment by edsouza | Hacker News Reader

I have looked at Zipline before, but it does not handle intraday trades, and does some guesses on when the trade executes during the "day", so you may not get the best price.

Running an algorithm for multi-day trades for more than a few months does not make sense on how the markets move, as certain events like "brexit", earnings, M&A, etc... affect stock price.

If you are really interested in algorithmic trading, and you have programming experience, it's best to build your own backtesting system with intraday market data (pay for this).

This way you will know the ins and outs of a trading system.

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Zipline dev here. Zipline happily works on minutely data (in fact, we recently dropped support for daily mode entirely on Quantopian, which is built on top of Zipline).

All the tutorials and examples for Zipline use daily data because there's no freely-available minutely data that we can distribute to our users.

Good to hear, I stopped using quantopian because of lack of intraday details.

;-) you ever review that PR I sent? No browsing HN on the Job! (I kid)

I looked at it briefly over the weekend and then got distracted trying to make numpy.isfinite() work on datetimes :(. It's still in the queue though! Feel encouraged to gently bump it if I don't get back to you in the next day or two.

For backtesting intraday trades, LEAN from QuantConnect is a better alternative.

Could you explain why you feel that it is better? What in particular does LEAN support that Zipline does not support?

Equities, FOREX, Futures, Options; tick, second, minute, hour and daily resolutions. Python, C# and F# backtesting. Dozens of models for improving the accuracy of your backtest.

Live trading on IB, Tradier, FXCM, Oanda and paper trading.

Local charting built in for desktop and backtesting.

Lots of tools provided for free data downloads to work with public free data libraries. lean.quantconnect.com

(I'm founder of QC :))

It is a little disingenuous to say that zipline doesn't support python, the short description from github says: "Zipline, a Pythonic Algorithmic Trading Library". Zipline also supports equities at minute and daily frequencies. There is no charting built into zipline itself but tearsheets and graphs can be generated with pyfolio (a project by the same people as zipline). Zipline also comes with the ability to pull pricing and splits data from quandl and yahoo.

I realize I can't win you over but I wanted to present a fair comparison for others ;)

Also, I work on zipline

Two features of LEAN won me over are : 1) LEAN supports finer data such as minutes, seconds, and ticks. 2) LEAN was developed in C#, which is way faster than Python.

At first glance you would think that python would be slower than C#; however, all of the real computation is happening in Numpy (C), Pandas (Cython which compiles to C), or in our own Cython. The extra overhead of the python is mainly dominated by the array computations happening in C or the IO of loading data.

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