What's new in PTQ

A quieter week in the app and a busy one on the competition. Here's what changed.

Setting risk limits from Claude no longer breaks the home page

If you asked Claude to set your risk limits before you'd finished setup in the app, the home page could crash when you opened it. Now the app fills in anything the chat didn't set with PTQ's defaults as your profile loads. Set your limits from Claude whenever you like and the app opens normally. Limits set from the chat don't count as finishing setup, so you can still go through it in the app.

Every screen is now tested against the half-filled profile the chat leaves behind, so this one stays fixed.

The October competition is open

Once a month you can enter one strategy. It locks when you submit it, then it's tracked forward on simulated money for the whole month. No real trades are placed. The ranking is the month's return divided by its biggest drop, so taking more risk doesn't move you up on its own.

October's entries close on 1 October at 00:00 US Central time, which is 06:00 UK, 01:00 New York and 15:00 Sydney. Dates, markets, how entries are simulated and the $500 prize for first place are all in the round notice, and the full rules are here.

Who can enter:

• Part-Time Quant Academy members, through the invite link in the Academy. It makes you an account that's only for the competition.
• Anyone with a paid PTQ subscription, from the same login.

A public leaderboard

The leaderboard is open to anyone, no sign-in. It shows positions and names only. You see your own strategy's simulated results in your competition account, and nobody sees anyone else's numbers. It's also linked from the footer of every page.

Every entry is measured on every bar of the month, so the standings can update through the day.

Entering is clearer

• The builder's button now says "Next: submit your entry".
• Only the round currently taking entries is offered, and it's already selected.
• Before you submit, the confirm screen tells you what locking means. Afterwards you get a link to the leaderboard.
• The competition page has the Report a problem button too.

If you report something

Reports go into the same queue as before. If one needs more detail before we can fix it, you may get an email from PTQ Support. That's an AI assistant working for Lewis. It asks what went wrong and what fixed would look like, and it sends four emails at most. Anything about billing, refunds, your account or security goes straight to Lewis.

Fixes made from your reports now go in this changelog each week, without names.

Fixes

• Academy members could see "membership verification is temporarily unavailable" on the competition page. The member list now updates every hour. Fixed.
• Buying Premium in the Academy now gets you a PTQ key within the hour, without anyone having to step in.
• The Academy tools could fetch crypto and forex prices from the wrong source on Day 3. The Day 1 prompt now installs the fixed tools.
• The Jev trading loop prompt now builds its state from real price history, retries a locked file on Windows, and says clearly that on Alpaca it runs long or flat. A sell closes the position. It can't open a short. It still trades paper by default.

If something in the competition doesn't make sense, or there's something you want PTQ to do next, tell us.

A lot went into PTQ this week, most of it straight from questions on the live training. Here's all of it.

Connect wherever you trade

There's now a list of 101 brokers, exchanges, data sources and tools that PTQ connects to, each with its logo. Search for yours or scroll the whole thing on the integrations page.

Nine are built in: Alpaca, Interactive Brokers, Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, Bybit, KuCoin and Bitget. You connect them in the PTQ app on your computer and that's it.

Yours isn't on the list? If it has an API, it still works. PTQ signs each order and sends it to a small endpoint you run, and your endpoint places it with your broker. Claude will help you set that up.

If PTQ doesn't have a live price for what you trade, a prop firm's futures for example, the broker you're connected to supplies the price for that order.

Live trading, from your own machine

Live trading runs through the PTQ app on your computer. Your keys stay on it. Nothing goes out until you've switched live trading on and armed that strategy yourself, and every order still has to pass your risk limits. Once a strategy is armed it can keep trading while you're away, inside those limits.

This is new, so start small. PTQ's orders have been tested on Alpaca's paper account and haven't been tested against a live broker yet.

Test on your own data

If PTQ doesn't carry the prices you want, bring them. Prop firm data, a futures feed, your broker's own history, anything with an API. Ask Claude to fetch it or hand it a CSV, and it's saved to your account as its own market. Anywhere from 60 rows to 100,000, and saving it uses no credits.

From there every test runs on it exactly as it does on PTQ's data. Same backtest, same five checks.

Test your own indicator

RSI from your charting platform or a score from your own model. Any number per bar works. Put it in the upload as a column called signal and PTQ works out where to act on it. It tests seven sets of levels so the overfitting and luck checks are real, and it goes through the same quant tests as everything else.

One thing to watch. PTQ can't see how your indicator was built, so if it uses future prices, every test will look better than real life.

Claude talks to you properly

• The first thing it asks is how deep you want to go: keep it simple, in between, or full quant.
• Shorter answers, and the numbers go in tables.
• Every reply ends with numbered options. You pick a number instead of staring at an empty box.
• Any term you don't know links to its page in the glossary.
• After every validation it scores the strategy out of 10 and leads with the score. When an idea has run its course it says so, tells you what it taught you, and offers a new one.
• You can set your risk limits from the chat, like how much one trade is allowed to lose.

The app keeps up with Claude

Make or test something in Claude and the page follows along without a refresh. Run a validation and it opens on the verdict.

Results are drawn now. A backtest opens with the answer in figures before any detail, and so does Performance. Your strategies show as bars you can click, and a research loop shows its progress as a bar.

Report a problem from any screen

Bottom right of every screen there's a report button. Paste a screenshot in with it so we can see exactly what you saw.

Connecting your AI is quicker

Connecting is one step at a time on screen. The check at the end takes two calls and no longer relies on a market being open, which is what tripped us up on the live training. Works with Claude, Codex or any MCP client.

Fixes

• A strategy made in Claude could open on a blank page. Fixed.
• A dip-buy strategy could turn the whole app white. Fixed, and every screen is now tested against the strategies Claude actually writes.
• Deleted strategies stay deleted, and their backtests go with them.
• The quote tool no longer suggests symbols it then refuses.

If the broker you use isn't on the list, or there's something you want PTQ to do next, tell us.