Qlib Tutorial: From Install to Your First Quant Strategy
Qlib is Microsoft’s open-source AI quant platform, released in 2020 and now sitting at 16k+ stars on GitHub. It bundles data, factors, models, backtesting, and reporting into one pipeline, ships with the Alpha158 and Alpha360 factor sets, and includes 20+ models out of the box (LightGBM, Transformer, TCN, and more). This Qlib tutorial walks from installation to a working LightGBM + Alpha158 strategy, then to reading the backtest report, and ends with a checklist of pitfalls. By the end you will: have Qlib running locally, have downloaded A-share daily data, train a model in 30 lines, run the standardised qrun workflow, and understand IC, annualised return, and max drawdown numbers in the output. ...