Quantopian

Wall Street trading is no longer about financiers boiling businesses down to their operating fundamentals [..]

Quantopian, a Boston-based algorithmic trading platform startup, aims to close this information advantage gap and give individual quants – like engineers, developers, mathematicians, and data scientists in other industries – the tools necessary to compete against Wall Street. Today, the company is announcing $6.7 million in Series A financing from Khosla Ventures and existing investor Spark Capital to fuel its growth toward this goal [..]

Since launching in beta in April 2013, Quantopian has crossed the 10,000 user mark and recently debuted live trading. Users of the platform can create and implement custom trading algorithms, while accessing a decade’s worth of historical trading data for backtesting. Users can also import any external dataset for use in algorithm development.

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Veeery cool.

In the FAQ to question “what data does Quantopian have?” they answer:

 ”The data includes all companies that were traded, including companies that have subsequently gone out of business. This is very important in order to avoid survivor bias. Without this complete data set, your algorithms would be be blind to the possibility of bankruptcy and the resulting losses”.

Wise choice. I like the way they think.

The programming environment is Python based, another plus.