Launch of Hot Chili Analytics

We have just launched a new on line back testing and live trading platform: we call it Hot Chili Analytics. The engine is based on Zipline (the creation of the Quantopian team) and is delivered in the form of a powerful virtual computer, hosted on Amazon’s AWS servers.

We offer a free tier and encourage you to take a look. Our product has some very significant advantages over the competition and will develop rapidly as we add more features — higher resolution data, expansion beyond Interactive Brokers for live trading and further and better example systems, enabling a faster climb up the learning curve.

The biggest disadvantage of online back testing and trading has been the lack of a powerful Integrated Development Environment and the inability to load up your own choice of complementary software.

By giving you a fully loaded virtual computer you can load the IDE of your choice — although HCA comes preloaded with Wing.

For the uninitiated, a professional and purpose built IDE comes into its own when developing systems — especially with an unfamiliar back testing engine. The powerful de-bugging facility allows the developer to follow his code line by line as far back as the language in which the engine is written, should he so choose.

Zipline is a powerful and complex beast and although it comes with a comprehensive manual, to fully grasp software on this scale it is essential to follow through the full stack as different procedures, modules and classes are called and executed.

It is one thing to read about it in a manual. It is a further step forward to look at a properly drawn schema of the software involved. But trawling through the API is no substitute for watching your code execute step by step with professional class de-bugging software. And that is exactly what HCA gives you.

You can develop through the IDE of your choice, or Jupyter if you prefer. HCA virtual computers come preloaded with Jupyter Lab.

Load up any other software you choose. A Python machine learning library perhaps? Biologically inspired algorithms have proved of great use solving the travelling salesman problem. Can you use an algorithm inspired by the anthill to better invest in markets? Neural networks perhaps?

Or do you believe that social Media feeds might predict stock market prices? Then load a web scraping device to trawl through social media posts and discover whether news related items or opinions (expert or otherwise) might better inform your trading.

Currently HCA connects with Interactive Brokers for live trading. Further brokers will be added rapidly over the next few months.

We will also be adding to the library of built in systems to give you ideas to develop your own trading.

Be aware that we are providers of software and not financial advisers or fund managers. What systems you develop and how you trade is up to you. We provide a framework but all the decisions are yours.

Are you an investor? Or at trader? If the former you may want to use HCA to develop sophisticated asset allocation systems. We have provided example code for risk parity, fixed ratio and trend following strategies.

If you are a trader, you may want to try shooting the lights out and discovering a new edge hidden in some arcane corner of the markets. Perhaps you believe highly geared stocks will outperform the markets. Or stocks with no leverage at all. Perhaps small companies are your thing, or penny stocks. The choice is yours.

Whatever you want to do, HCA provides you with the framework to do it.