🚨BREAKING: Microsoft open-sourced an AI Quant investment platform in Python
This is what you need to know:
(a thread)
1. What is Qlib?
Qlib is an open-source, AI-oriented quantitative investment platform that aims to realize the potential, empower research, and create value using AI technologies in quantitative investment, from exploring ideas to implementing production.
2. How it works
Qlib provides an automated quant research workflow that builds the dataset, trains models, backtests, and evaluates the results.
12 Python libraries for free market data everyone should know:
yfinance
Data for stocks (historic, intraday, fundamental), FX, crypto, and options. Uses Yahoo Finance so any data available through Yahoo is available through yfinance.
pandas-datareader used to be part of the pandas project. Now an independent project. Includes data for stocks, FX, economic indicators, Fama-French factors, and many others.
yfinance pulls live and historical price data for any ticker in seconds. Plotly turns it into interactive charts. Add your own indicators, overlays, and alerts. No subscription needed.
yfinance exposes full income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements directly. Pull any company's financials into a DataFrame, calculate your own ratios, and build custom models — all in a notebook.
This strategy has delivered 18% annual returns since 1926.
No black box. No complex ML model.
Just breakouts, trailing stops, and volatility sizing applied to industry portfolios.
Here's how it works (and link to the 37 page PDF):
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🔹 THE ENTRIES
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A long position triggers when an industry breaks above either:
• A Donchian Channel (20-day high, 40-day lower band)
• A Keltner Channel (20-day EMA ± 1.4× ATR, 40-day lower band)
The asymmetric lookback keeps you invested during sustained trends.
No short positions. When nothing is trending, capital sits in T-bills.
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🔹 THE EXITS
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Trailing stop = the higher of the 40-day Donchian or Keltner lower band.
Once it moves up, it never moves back down.
Then wonder why their backtests fail in live trading.
You don't need a math degree. But you need the right foundations.
Here's the complete math & stats roadmap for trading:
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🔹 STATISTICS & PROBABILITY
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• Sample Size & Law of Large Numbers — a 10-trade backtest proves nothing. You need hundreds before trusting your edge.
• Expected Value — the only number that actually matters: (Win% × Avg Win) - (Loss% × Avg Loss)
• Standard Deviation — becomes volatility when applied to returns. Every position sizing formula runs through this.
• Correlation — 3 momentum strategies on correlated assets isn't diversification. It's 3x the risk.
• Conditional Probability — your strategy's win rate changes by market regime. Know when it works.
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🔹 LINEAR ALGEBRA
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• Vectors & Matrices — your portfolio is a weighted sum of vectors. Risk is matrix multiplication.
• PCA — turns 50 correlated indicators into 5 independent signals. Less noise, more edge.