Quite shocking news... Does anyone here know the actual reason behind this sudden close? https://www.quantopian.com/posts/quantopians-community-services-are-closing
good it was cluster of the most arrogant elitist pricks i have ever seen. their money run out probably as their over optimized crap systems lost tons of actual money while back test were showing profitable results. surprised it lasted as long as it did.
Because of this... "...We launched the Quantopian community in 2012 with just a simple backtester. You pushed us to keep building and improving, leading us to the high-quality platform that is Quantopian today. Thank you to everyone for making Quantopian so special... thanks, fawce" High-quality platform that makes Quantopian what it is today? You mean MADE it special. It is going away. And notice how he signed off? "fawce". Not a care in the world for proper spelling or grammar. I hope folks did not pay for that level of unprofessionalism. He got busted doing something illegal. That is the ONLY reason he is shutting down his super-site.
I can only speculate, but considering that I've been doing a similar thing for 23 years now, my guess is that the work required to run and maintain that community site was just too much for the revenue (if any) that was generated. When you start a site like that, you can have all sorts of grand visions to help people learn and become better. But as the site grows, it starts to become an administrative disaster. The members constantly want new features added, current features altered, usernames changed, accounts deleted, etc. And we haven't even gotten into dealing with all of the moderation headaches like inappropriate posts, spammers, users fighting back and forth, and a whole slew of other people problems that occur when you bring a large group together. So what starts out a labor of love to help people eventually turns into a huge burden of managing people. And unfortunately, not everyone who starts such a site is cut out to be a manager in that way. And let's not even get started on all the technical requirements that continue to unfold as the site gets larger. More servers are required, which means more development, maintenance, and technical expertise is required as time goes on. And if a significant revenue stream was never baked in to start with, there's simply no resources to hire the personnel required to run the damn thing. So it's just easier to fold the whole thing up and move on to the next phase of life than it is to keep the operation running. Again, that's just a guess on my part.
Did you know that at the same time you were generating this site, games like this were being created right next to you? Man, how time flies!
I really appreciate this reply. Even more, coming from the founder of ET himself. I hope some day you can get the reward you deserve for managing this site.. and its members
Conspiracy theory: since Steve Cohen invested in Quantopian, some of their users were already worrying whether he won't try to snatch their strategies, so it's possible that their fears came true. While there is no reason to discard the fact that Quantopian has some potential to become a strategy mining goldmine for the owners.
It's more likely (as it was gossiped around Steves shop about a year ago) that it was a worthless investment and Cohen Ventures decided not to participate in the next round of funding.