I wasn’t a programmer I wasn’t a programmer, took a python basics course on youtube and their free bootcamp course and I was surprised how quickly I picked up object oriented programming and algorithmic trading coding on their platform. The stocks data is free up to seconds timeframe, after a long research on competitors I choose quantconnect and it was up to my expectations.

Shady site Shady site not sure if the team behind are trustworthy with holding your algos data. I found other frameworks like backtrader that are easier to pick up and get working with quickly than LEAN. LEAN is poorly documenting making learning a huge hurdle. Also, I question the stability of their site because of the amount of bugs you can find in their UI and some that I encountered in plotting during backtrading. If you need an online IDE, Quantopian is far more reliable and documented and quicker to work with but still could have issues with data privacy.

Great technology, accessible team, invaluable supporters of the ecosystem QuantConnect has been an invaluable partner for my personal trading and for a university class that I teach. The community is incredibly supportive, and the leadership team are accessible which is almost unheard of in trading platforms these days. In my class, my graduate level students have been able to personally engage and implement constructs like Fama French factors, and QuantConnect has been an active supporter to facilitate my students learning. It's incredible to join the community, have access to a variety of detailed trading algorithms, instructional videos, and see my students feel confident implementing week-to-week. I don't think there's anything like QuantConnect out there today, and I'm a big supporter of their efforts. I can't imagine my own trading or teaching my class without it!

This is a pretty unique business This is a pretty unique business. I've learned a lot as an investor just creating and running simulations here. I really wish these folks the best and hope they can continue to grow and thrive.

Complex, difficult API, slow backtesting Extremely slow backtesting and very complex APi with bad documentation - be ready to spend many hours trying to understand the overly complex API that is changing all the time. And did I mention that support costs? So if a anything is complex you won't get answers from the staff unless you PAY them. I give them 2 stars as they have reasonably reliable data. The platform itself is only worth one star. note: if you ask about slowness or any other thing negative on their forum they delete the posts.