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Who is using it

See the sections after this for references of usage.

Old Website References

The original website stated that backtrader is used in (at least):

  • 2 Eurostoxx50 Banks

  • 6 Quantitative Trading Firms

That was long ago and a lot more are known to the author, including other type of trading companies in sectors like "Energy Trading".

Why were no names given?

  1. I never asked

  2. They never asked

Can you then sustain those claims?

Already asked (and answered) in Reddit - [Question] How popular is Backtrader on this sub?

Let's quote the answer from that thread.

Quote

No. There is not a list. This is actually outdated: the number of banks remains at 2 (there may be more, but I don't know it), but there are more than 6 firms using it for internal purposes, including for example companies working in energy markets, due to the compensation feature which allows buying and selling different assets which compensate each other (this is probably not available in zipline) which allows to model using spot and futures prices (this is a particularity of energy markets to avoid having the actual goods delivered to you)

The thing here is that one would have to define usage. I can for example quote what someone from one of those banks told me: "we use backtrader to quickly prototype our ideas and backtest them. If they prove to be what we expected and after further refinement, they will be rewritten in Java and put into our production system"

This is actually the same scheme which one of the Quant firms (which I personally visited) used: prototyping in backtrader and production in Java.

As you may imagine I don't track the lifes of those using backtrader, so it may also be that some of the banks and companies decided to no longer use backtrader.

I do also guess that some banks and quant firms use zipline following the same scheme.