Quantopian, which inspires people from all over the world to write automated investment algorithms on its revolutionary free platform, has hired industry veteran Jonathan Larkin as its Chief Investment Officer.
Larkin's prior experience spans senior roles at some of the largest multi-manager and quantitative investment firms in the world.
Larkin will direct the Company's investment strategy, leading the effort to identify, select, and allocate capital to investment algorithms created by Quantopian's community of more than 80,000 algorithm writers. Writers of selected algorithms share in the profits generated by their algorithms.
"I look forward to helping investors understand the unique model that Quantopian has developed,” says Larkin. “There are two pressing, and closely related, issues for hedge fund managers today: the increasing difficulty in finding talented investment professionals; and the increasing difficulty for the managers' funds to generate truly differentiated alpha at scale. Quantopian is uniquely positioned to meet these challenges with its unified platform and global talent pool. We have set the stage for a steady supply of high quality alpha, with almost limitless investment scale.”
"Jonathan's background encompasses the two fields of investment management -–multi-manager and quantitative investing – that we are seeking to fuse and scale using the internet. As Quantopian prepares to manage external capital, Jonathan's presence will dramatically increase Quantopian's ability to make meaningful allocations of capital to the most promising algorithms," says John Fawcett, CEO of Quantopian.
Larkin will also be overseeing the Company's research, risk analysis, and trading operations components. "The Quantopian infrastructure for research and strategy development is not just impressive because it is freely available, but also because its capabilities rival the installed and proprietary technology at some of the most well-established institutional asset managers and hedge funds," Larkin said. "I'm thrilled to help Quantopian's world-class product team take the platform even further."
Larkin's hiring closely follows the hiring of Derek Meisner as Quantopian's General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer. The two executives add significant financial, operational, and compliance depth as Quantopian prepares to manage external money.
