Quantopian Milestones November 2016

The last few weeks have been both hectic and thrilling. Quantopian hit three different milestones, and each one of them builds on the last.

New Funding for Quantopian

You probably saw it in the news that we raised a new round of funding, $25 million. It was led by a new investor, Andreessen Horowitz, and our previous venture capital backers joined in as well.

Marc Andreessen famously wrote the essay: "Why Software is Eating the World." That's one of the ideas that drives us and guides us here at Quantopian. In the old world, the education and tools for writing an algorithmic strategy were available to a very small group of people. In the new world, the software we are writing at Quantopian is making algorithmic trading available to everyone. We're providing a research platform and a backtester, and the data you need to bring them to life. Of course, you have to learn how to use these tools, and software helps with that too.

Education: QuantCon

The Quantopian platform is ideal for learning about quantitative finance. We provide the education you need in order to write an algorithmic strategy.

If you haven't seen the Quantopian Lecture Series, you need to go see what we have available. The lectures range from practical starters on pair trading to highly theoretical explorations of mathematical models like ARCH and GARCH. We're providing step-by-step tutorials to get you started and learn our powerful Pipeline API.

The new funding round is going to help us expand our education. If you want to see the roadmap, read CIO Jonathan Larkin's blog post on the quant's workflow. We're adding high-quality educational materials for every step of the quant's path.

We’ve been rolling all this content into events IRL too. I just got back from Singapore where we hosted our third QuantCon (the first two were in New York City). It was fantastic to be there with hundreds of smart, interested algorithm writers from all over Asia and Australia. Not only was there the conference, and a free hackathon, but we also ran three educational workshops. At this point we've had more than 600 people attend one of these day-long deep training sessions.

100,000 Members

The Quantopian community now has more than 100,000 members! To each of you who have joined, thank you! You’ve made Quantopian into a great platform, helped your fellow members learn, and created original and profitable investment algorithms. Everyone here at Q loves making products for you, and seeing your work advance as the platform improves.

In the spirit of our little journey together, we made you a present: a timeline of our history together. You can see what your member number is, and a few other fun tidbits about your history with Quantopian. And if you haven’t joined yet, you can still be part of the first million members!

This is such a great milestone because it so clearly demonstrates how Quantopian is changing the industry. When 2012 came to a close, we had just over 1,500 Quantopian members, and around the same time we estimated that there were about 10,000 people working professionally in quantitative finance in the world. Now, the Quantopian community is ten times that number! With free access to a world-class platform, every Quantopian member can learn about programming, statistics, quant finance, and algorithmic investing. We are seeing original work in algorithms we evaluate for allocations, and I predict that in the near future our community will spur major advances in the field.

Coming Up

That’s three milestones down, with many more to come. We’re working on the next plans already.

More education. I mentioned this already, but it bears repeating. We’re expanding our education to cover more of the quant workflow, the workflow to writing an algorithmic strategy.
More data. We have added more than 50 data sets to Quantopian and we will add many more in the coming months. We’re particularly interested in finding algorithms that use this data. Why? Because we believe you, our community, can find new and uncorrelated alpha by exploring and combining all these data
More allocations. We have 17 community-written algorithms trading today with allocations from Quantopian. We plan to add dozens more in 2017.
Managing money for external customers. We’ve been working since this summer on integrating with a prime broker and the other technical requirements necessary before we start trading with external money. We’re looking forward bringing all of that online early next year!

Thank you, all of you, for your help making the Quantopian community what it is.

Happy coding!

fawce

Hi Fawce,

Regarding:

We have 17 community-written algorithms trading today with allocations from Quantopian.

Any chance you could be a bit more transparent in this area? Assuming your business is mainly (entirely?) geared around potential profits from the hedge fund, you must be seeing some magic in those 17 algos to have attracted the Point72 money, and now another big venture capital infusion. Do you have data that could be shared to explain why you have been successful in attracting investors (i.e. can you share with us what you shared with the investors to convince them to put up the money)?

Also, the ratio of algos funded to total community members is relatively low, so your platform has to support a large number of unproductive users (my rank would be high on that list, no doubt). As you say "you can still be part of the first million members!" but the scaling is not so obvious. With a million members, would you expect that many more uncorrelated/unique/scalable algos for the fund? There must be a point of diminishing returns, no? Or maybe the platform costs get cheaper as you scale up? Or you expect to profit off of users in ways other than the hedge fund?