Zipline Refresh

A high-performance Pythonic backtesting engine for algorithmic trading strategies

Zipline is a Pythonic event-driven system for backtesting, originally developed by Quantopian. This Refresh fork modernizes the storage layer, eliminates legacy dependencies, and delivers significant performance improvements.

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What's New in Refresh

Storage: bcolz → Apache Parquet

The legacy bcolz storage layer has been fully replaced with Apache Parquet via PyArrow:

Performance Optimizations

Profiling-driven optimizations on the backtest hot path (50 assets, 780 bars/session):

Net result: pandas DatetimeIndex overhead reduced from 46% to 6.5% of hot-path time. Overall backtest data layer is ~2x faster.

Before optimization:
  pandas DatetimeIndex             46.0%  ██████████████████████████████████████████████
  get_value (reader)               13.0%  █████████████
  memoize/lazyval                  10.0%  ██████████

After optimization:
  pandas DatetimeIndex              6.5%  ██████
  get_value (reader)               26.7%  ██████████████████████████
  memoize/lazyval                  12.9%  ████████████
  numpy operations                 12.2%  ████████████

Total hot-path time: 0.44s → 0.24s (1.8x faster)
Per-bar latency: 0.6ms → 0.3ms

Features

• Event-Driven Architecture — Realistic simulation with proper order lifecycle, slippage, and commission models
• Pipeline API — Factor-based screening with 20+ built-in technical factors (RSI, MACD, Bollinger, Ichimoku, etc.) and easy CustomFactor extensibility
• Factor Composition — rank(), zscore(), demean(), winsorize(), top(N) with groupby for sector-neutral strategies
• PyData Integration — pandas DataFrames in/out, compatible with matplotlib, scipy, statsmodels, scikit-learn
• Multi-Country Support — 42 country domains with proper trading calendars via exchange_calendars
• Minute & Daily Resolution — Full minute-level backtesting with proper market open/close handling

Installation

Zipline supports Python >= 3.10 and is compatible with current versions of NumFOCUS libraries.

Using pip

pip install zipline-refresh

From source

git clone https://github.com/teleclaws/zipline-refresh.git
cd zipline-refresh
pip install -e .

See the documentation for detailed instructions.

Quickstart

The following implements a simple dual moving average crossover strategy:

from zipline.api import order_target, record, symbol


def initialize(context):
    context.i = 0
    context.asset = symbol('AAPL')


def handle_data(context, data):
    context.i += 1
    if context.i < 300:
        return

    short_mavg = data.history(context.asset, 'price', bar_count=100, frequency="1d").mean()
    long_mavg = data.history(context.asset, 'price', bar_count=300, frequency="1d").mean()

    if short_mavg > long_mavg:
        order_target(context.asset, 100)
    elif short_mavg < long_mavg:
        order_target(context.asset, 0)

    record(AAPL=data.current(context.asset, 'price'),
           short_mavg=short_mavg,
           long_mavg=long_mavg)

Run it

# Ingest data from NASDAQ (requires free API key from https://data.nasdaq.com)
export QUANDL_API_KEY="your_key_here"
zipline ingest -b quandl

# Run backtest
zipline run -f dual_moving_average.py --start 2014-1-1 --end 2018-1-1 -o dma.pickle --no-benchmark

More examples in the zipline/examples directory.

Compatibility Notes

Release 3.05 — Compatible with NumPy 2.0 (requires pandas >= 2.2.2)

Release 3.0 — Updated to pandas >= 2.0 and SQLAlchemy > 2.0

Release 2.4 — Updated to exchange_calendars >= 4.2

Contributing

This project is sponsored by Kavout.

Found a bug or have a suggestion? Open an issue.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE for details.