Quantopian, the crowd-sourced quantitative investment firm, will launch in Australia this weekend with a series of outreach events for local practicing and aspirational quants.
Quantopian, which was founded in the US in 2011, provides an open platform where anyone can research, backtest, and execute their algorithmic strategies. The firm picks the best-performing algorithms and allocates capital to them. The algorithm authors are paid a percentage of profits earned by the algorithm, and retain the rights to it as their intellectual property. An Australian was among the first to receive an allocation from the firm for his algorithm in 2015.
In addition to its platform, Quantopian offers free lectures and materials to help people build their coding and finance skills. These materials are in use at US universities including Cornell and Stanford. The firm has run events and workshops in the US, London, and Paris over the past year and is now bringing its unique offering to Australia.
“Australia and Singapore are known for their great talent and it made sense for us to come down and show what our platform has to offer,” says Delaney Granizo-Mackenzie, who heads up academic outreach for Quantopian. “We have 65,000 members on our platform right now, and we are looking to grow that number. We are finding, and funding, quant talent that the traditional firms just can’t see.”
Quantopian’s Singapore workshops will be held during the day on 21 and 22 March. The Australian workshop is on Saturday March 26th in Sydney, following a free meetup on Thursday the 24th. For more details visit www.quantopian.com/workshops.
Quantopian is funded by a consortium including Bessemer Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Khosla Ventures. Headquartered in Boston, the firm was conceived as a crowd-sourced way to “hack Wall Street” by founders John “Fawce” Fawcett and Jean Bredeche. The firm made initial allocations to three algorithms crowd-sourced from the community in 2015, and has made additional allocations in 2016.
