In our work at QuantConnect we have helped with thousands of budding quants over the years. Our algorithm development terminal is a powerful backtesting platform that allows members to design strategies on 15 years of past equities data.

We see several very common mistakes in even the most basic strategies. For our latest free video tutorial – Coding the Exponential Moving Average Strategy – we wanted to start by helping users avoid these common mistakes and show how they could avoid them. These common mistakes are…

1. Debounce your Algorithm – Increase your algorithm efficiency by ensuring it only fires once per trading signal.

2. Single Trigger per Signal – Tightly manage cash flow and trigger orders at the optimal time by ensuring algorithms only send orders once per signal.

3. Reduce Variables and Avoid Optimization – Be wary of curve fitting and high parameter counts to make your algorithm look profitable on past data.

Check out their tutorial video with the coding walk-through, and how to avoid these common mistakes when you’re building a strategy.