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Quantopian as Instavest competitor?
Thomas Lin
posted Oct 30, 2016

Just read about Instavest on a recent WSJ article.

It made me think Quantopian has everything set up to offer a similar, even better service in which Quantopian users co-invest their capital with the real money trading algorithms of fellow users for a share of the profits. There's already an established community on this site, Quantopian can provide verifiable real-money trading records of its users from deployed algorithms, and it sounds like Quantopian already has the capital sharing functionality implemented for their contest winners - I imagine it would be straightforward to make such functionality public.

On Instavest, co-investors send their money to a stranger, while on Quantopian, coinvesting would presumably constitute having another person's algorithm execute in your brokerage account; Personally I would be much more comfortable having with the latter since the money stays under your brokerage account instead of going into someone else's account, and algorithmic trading results are more predictable than that of people. Overall, I think Quantopian's algorithmic real money trading implementation is much more suited to the community investing vision Instavest is going for.

PS Instavest does not support brokerage linking of IB or Robinhood accounts so its impossible to share verified Quantopian RMT results on the site.
If this ideas already been brought up, I apologize but I did make an effort to search for duplicate posts (of which I found none)

2 responses
Anthony FJ Garner
Oct 30, 2016

I asked a while ago whether Quantopian would be interested in hosting our algos for offer out to retail and they said no. Re Instavest this approach is by no means new. There are several (many?) outfits out there. I am told that the money is far from sticky and the retail punters flock to the recent high performers usually to lose most of what they invest.

If anybody offered a genuine fund management platform that would indeed be interesting but I think there are quite a number of robo fund managers out there now, even in the UK.

Also, I don't suppose Instavest has much of AUM?

In principal however I quite agree although the regulatory perspective needs careful enquiry. Certainly so far as the UK is concerned.

Moataz Elmasry
Oct 31, 2016

On Instavest, co-investors send their money to a stranger

I just created an account on Instavest and this doesn't seem to be the case. When I clicked on invest, it prompted me for which linked brokerage account I wanted to use and the amount of shares I wanted to buy. Can you clarify what you mean by sending their money to a stranger?

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