QuantConnect enables algorithmic traders of all experience levels to turn an idea into a reality. I first found QuantConnect many many years ago while contemplating building my own backtesting platform. I was relieved to find QuantConnect and its open sourced LEAN project. The engineering philosophy that underpins the platform is one of unlimited customizability while also making the most common tasks simple or automatic.

The full QuantConnect platform provides its users many tools that improve the efficiency and most importantly reduce the time between idea and feasibility testing. As with any software product, time needs to be spent learning the APIs, but with documentation for the entire platform available directly in the browser combined with QuantConnect's algorithm bootcamp and extensive documentation of recipes detailing how to use each and every feature, this spinup time is greatly reduced, especially if you're already confident with your programming skills.

QuantConnect even provides a free tier, which is awesome. You can test your trading ideas using free backtesting and when you've built something worth trading you can run it through paper trading to make sure you haven't overfit your algorithm and then run it against your real brokerage account.

Even if you don't have your own capital to trade, if you've built a great algorithm you can license it out to other investors using QuantConnect's new Alpha Streams Marketplace.

All software products have bugs. What differentiates the good from the bad is the response. From everything I've heard, QuantConnect support is very timely with their responses and it's usually not a bug, but rather a coding error. When bugs are found, they are fixed in github and once the fix is merged its available on the QuantConnect platform within about 5 minutes!