Hello everyone,

We're shutting down the broker integration feature at the end of September. Everything else on Quantopian will continue unchanged - Quantopian Research, our backtester, our community, and all of our data. We continue to make allocations to selected algorithms, and we're still running the Quantopian Open every month. We've already contacted the few hundred community members who use the feature to let them know. For most of the community, this decision means we can spend more of our time and energy on improving Quantopian. We will be making it easier to learn about quantitative finance, to research strategies, and perhaps get an allocation.

We thought long and hard before we made this decision. A key element of our company philosophy is to keep our goals aligned with our community's goals. This ensures that we're delivering the best experience and product that we can; we're working for you, and for us, all the time. At the end of last year that was still true - we were making allocations and trading our company's capital using the Interactive Brokers integration. Our success depended on the broker integration, and we felt the pain of every limitation and bug in that integration ourselves.

That pain made sure we were investing and improving the integration every day. In April we started trading on behalf of our investment clients using a prime broker, an integration that uses a different codebase. That was the moment when the company goals significantly diverged from the goals of personal traders. Our focus has been on helping the community create high-quality algorithms that we can fund with allocations of millions of dollars, and not on the broker integrations. We have concluded that we can't support personal trading at the level of quality that you deserve and expect.

Moving forward, we want to help people find other ways to trade their own money algorithmically. One possible option is the zipline-live open source project that is derived from our open source backtester, zipline. This project has the potential to be an alternative for personal trading. We've talked to the project leaders, and we've agreed to support the future development of zipline-live. Interactive Brokers has agreed to provide some assistance as well. We support more than a dozen different open source projects already and zipline-live fits our mission. We are also soliciting additional corporate sponsors to help support the project. If you're interested in using this project for your own personal trading, or in helping to build this project please visit http://www.zipline-live.io/.

We launched the Quantopian community in 2012 with just a simple backtester. The feature requests came in fast, and we kept building - first fetcher, and later we added more rigorous alternative data sources. We built broker integrations, history, pipeline, futures, and more. We thank everyone for their help from the bottom of our hearts. The community has pushed us to keep building a high-quality platform. We can't thank you all enough for believing in us and working with us.

I said earlier in this post that our focus has evolved. Still, I want to repeat that our core principles have not and will not change. We're here to democratize finance, to educate people from all over the world, to teach about quantitative finance. We are just sorry that we don't have the resources to do everything we want to. We thank you for all of your support.

Sincerely,

fawce