Is it fair to say backtrader/2 have both stopped receiving active maintainence?

[qiuxiaomu]

Thanks for making backtrader/2 available for everyone who's interested in trading!

And it's sad to see that backtrader/2 have both not received any development recently.

Is it correct to say, backtrader/2 are, abandoned (unfortunately I had to use this word)?

[lucidinvestor]

I think it's fair to say it did not receive active development BUT I think it's too early to say it's been abandoned.

There is still a continuous flow of Q&A from new users - because backtrader remains one of the very best framework to build an automated trading system (that is well documented, and battle tested).

The Challenge right now is to consolidate (reduce) the community around consistent use cases - we see a lot of individual initiatives but these do not merge yet - backtrader2 was one attempt.

Doomed by its popularity, feature requests are for many different use cases (options, forex, stock, crypto), and at the same time lots of so called "issues" actually relate to improper end-user coding/implementation (time consuming support away from development & maintenance).

I have recently added a new feature for receiving live bid/ask prices from IB - this was requested a lot. it's here: https://gitlab.com/algorithmic-trading-library/backtrader. This is yet another "repo" in the wild.

My question to you and the rest of the community - what forum and what conversations should we initiate to move forward ?

[warp-9000]

@lucidinvestor are you aware of any public Slack or Discord servers that are still actively discussing backtrader, forked versions, or competitive programs?

[lucidinvestor]

nope for active discussion servers. One manageable way to create such a discussion channel is to really focus the topic of such channel, i.e. stock trading, crypto trading, option trading - and maybe further narrow down such topics. Otherwise it's too much work and that may be why bt2 is not maintained anymore.

We're a community - we should decentralize the maintenance across different groups that share similar interest and challenges - while periodically ensuring that each group's code change do not break others. One suggestion to achieve this is by spinning off the brokers/feeds as backtrader_contributions (what the original authors started to do - maybe not for this purpose), and having backtrader focused only on backtesting. This would ensure compatibility across all different live trading use cases (crypto, stock, option). We will probably start this refactoring when we start working on bt+ib_insyc or bt+IbApi.

on "competitive programs" - yes there are a couple. QuantConnect Lean, Nautilus (as identified by backtrader2 leads) - but Backtrader has been tested for years, has demonstrated stability, and is super python-friendly. Each time we evaluate the tradeoff for a change, the conclusion is to stay with bt - and that's why there is still a community around it despite the lack of maintenance.

on "forked versions" - Lucid is slowly building its way forward and we will update the community on our perspective as soon as possible. Right now, we are moving forward with the suggestions stated above. We will do everything here: https://gitlab.com/algorithmic-trading-library

Resilience will find its way - mayve we will end up having a collaborative decentralized community, maybe the community will be smaller as some backtrader features will be dropped by maintainers .... we will see - But for now, this remains a good framework to move forward for DIY investors.

[jjphung]

@warp-9000 @lucidinvestor Here's the discord for backtrader. https://discord.gg/HTBSTbdJ

[neillbyrne]

@warp-9000 @lucidinvestor Here's the discord for backtrader. https://discord.gg/HTBSTbdJ

Looks like the invite link has expired. Would it be possible to extend another @jjphung . Thanks in advance