Trading Evolved: Anyone can Build Killer Trading Strategies in Python

by Andreas Clenow

Systematic trading allows you to test and evaluate your trading ideas before risking your money. By formulating trading ideas as concrete rules, you can evaluate past performance and draw conclusions about the viability of your trading plan.

Following systematic rules provides a consistent approach where you will have some degree of predictability of returns, and perhaps more importantly, it takes emotions and second guessing out of the equation.

From the onset, getting started with professional grade development and backtesting of systematic strategies can seem daunting. Many resort to simplified software which will limit your potential.

Trading Evolved will guide you all the way, from getting started with the industry standard Python language, to setting up a professional backtesting environment of your own. The book will explain multiple trading strategies in detail, with full source code, to get you well on the path to becoming a professional systematic trader.

This is a highly practical book, where every aspect is explained, all source code shown and no holds barred.

Written by Andreas F. Clenow, author of the international best sellers Following the Trend and Stocks on the Move, Trading Evolved goes into greater depth and covers strategies for trading both futures and equities.

"Trading Evolved is an incredible resource for aspiring quants. Clenow does an excellent job making complex subjects easy to access and understand. Bravo."Wes Gray, PhD, CEO Alpha Architect

Genres: Finance, Programming, Business

444 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 10, 2019

About the author

Growing up in a tiny Swedish town, Andreas has spent the past few decades in the Swiss high finance world. That journey involved IT startups, corporate management, garage band hedge funds, quant finance, proper hedge funds, private equity, family offices, and authoring some books.

He has written three international best sellers in the finance, non-fiction space - Following the Trend, Stocks on the Move, and Trading Evolved, and he is translated into eight languages.

With his upcoming work of fiction - a finance noir crime story set in the heart of Zurich, he hopes to finally be able to call himself a novelist.

Reviews

[♠ TABI⁷ ♠]

look why not okay if GameStop can have it happen then so can I

[Sebastian Godoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you come from a financial background and you want to learn to create models and backtest them in python, specially focused in futures, then this book is for you.

I come from a software engineer background, so I was expecting simpler strategies or at least that not the half of the book to be about trading futures.

Although, I liked how Andreas write, it's a very entertaining.

[Scortt · Rating 1 out of 5]

No, It's not worth read at all.

[Jonathan Birnbaum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed 'how-to' primer on setting up a backtesting environment using python and zipline, the opensource version of the Quantopian engine. Great if you want to get hands on and learn python, pandas, and the nuances of using the zipline environment. The authors website has notebooks w source code you can download to make it much easier to follow along.

Andreas has a great sense of humor sprinkling the text with jokes, and assumes very little starting knowledge for the reader while ramping up complexity fairly quickly. Great to get exposure to key libraries like PyFolio, and there's lots of code I want to bookmark for later reference. The huge negative is everything in here being constrained to zipline, which is painful to set up and use. Despite having gone through this, I'm not going to use zipline and need to continue exploring backtrader and quantconnect.

Especially enjoyed the monkey vs SPX500 comparison and the analysis of combining strategies.

Extra plus was a chapter by Robert Carver on an elegant comparison of two strategies using first principles.