I was wondering much the same myself. I have been absent trading awhile and many of the platforms I used to frequent have gone very quiet. One, Tradingblox, looks effectively dead.

My personal take is that much quant trading has been undistinguished in recent years. Trend following is flat as a pancake for instance.

Perhaps people have got fed up?

Perhaps the end of the rainbow is not discoverable?

Having said all that, Quantopian's objectives in terms of investment performance are very undemanding in terms of not needing to outperform. They seem to be seeking a below market return for below market volatility using long short equity. That's probably too simplistic, I'm sure I have missed something.

But I'd have thought they could get that from a Bridgewater approach and use bonds (presumably unleveraged).

The majority of private punters want raw performance but most of those seem to have disappeared. Presumably disappointed that back testing so often misleads us and also because they can no longer use Quantopian to trade.

Looking for new inspiration myself. Can't seem to find much at the moment!

Hi Vladimir,
It is a good question. One that we ponder frequently.

TL;DR: Quantopian provides opportunity.

We think of Quantopian as a company that provides opportunity. As fawce has said in the past, the quant is our "north star." We provide equal opportunity to pursue quantitative finance to anyone who has an internet connection and a web browser, anywhere in the world. We do so by providing a lot of free tools, a lot of free, cleaned data and a lot of free educational resources. We provide an open-ended, ad hoc research environment that is integrated with cleaned financial data with convenient API. And we moderate a community to focus primarily on learning and improving skills in quantitative finance. A new notebook is an absolute clean slate. You can go in any direction you want.

Most everyone here is motivated by a desire to learn and we do our best to cater to that desire to learn about quantitative finance. We want you to have a chance to pursue this field, regardless of the location in which you happen to be.

We also provide opportunity to people to earn money through this pursuit. 69 people have earned money in our new daily contest. And 23 have taken the opportunity to license Quantopian their IP in order for us to make an allocation to them. To help more people take advantage of that opportunity, we've focused our new design of the backtest analysis screens towards the evaluation criteria for the contest (and by extension for allocations). We're busy improving that design based on feedback in order to cover more use cases and we're also mindful that the research environment not only provides an open workflow for alpha research, but also access to the results of backtests to programmatically evaluate your strategies any number of ways.

Unfortunately we cannot provide every member of this community the perfect Quantopian for their individualized purposes. But the quant remains our north star and our navigational guide. Our goal is to create a place that provides opportunity in quant finance to as many people as possible and we're trying to blaze a path that balances the interests of pure learning and inquiry and the needs of viable business model.

Thanks
Josh

In the end, I see Quantopian holding up their end of the bargain by being the middle man, transferring money from those who have lots of it to those who would like more of it. My read is that the focus on the contest and changes to the backtester are just an effort by Q to enhance the flow of money into quant pockets (while also taking a cut). The changes to the backtester were a bit of an overshoot, but presumably adjustments are in the works.

The one gripe I have is that the concept of collectivism is not a stronger element of Quantopian. Fawce & Co. missed the mark in this area, in my opinion. I won't elaborate; I'll let folks who've been with Quantopian for awhile fill in the blanks. Perhaps, though, collectivism and money flow from Wall Street to quants are mutually exclusive. Maybe doing business with the establishment requires modeling their power pyramids, lest they feel uncomfortable. Maybe without the traditional power structure, a lot less money would be available to quants?

Hi Josh -

I continue to be confused by what you say versus what you do. I mean this to be constructive, since I appreciate that you may have difficultly, as is true for any product developer and offer-er, in seeing things from a user perspective. I also appreciate that you have legal constraints on what you can discuss publicly, and your investors/stakeholders may have certain expectations of what and how you communicate. There is also the issue of detracting from the technical side of things on the forum with "business model" topics, but that would be easily addressed by welcoming this type of discussion, and providing a separate area for it.

I will provide several recent forum examples of opportunities lost, in my opinion:

https://www.quantopian.com/posts/what-type-of-content-would-you-like-to-see

Delaney reached out to the community, and got a tremendous response. He basically took in the information (presumably) and then just let the thread die.

Another one:

https://www.quantopian.com/posts/pipeline-timeoutexception-any-hope-for-a-fix

Scott did provide good feedback on the specific issue, and offered up the possibility of a tweak, but the more global issues raised, I suspect, will just die on the vine.

Here's an easy one:

https://www.quantopian.com/posts/current-alphalens-tutorial-slash-lesson-slash-video

I got no response.

And I expressed interest in how one might determine if the risk model style factors are even valid:

https://www.quantopian.com/posts/risk-model-white-paper-released-and-available-for-your-reading

No response on what would seem to be an important point.

This goes way back, but you could probably still glean some ideas from it:

https://www.quantopian.com/posts/feature-requests-what-changes-would-you-like-to-see

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

My impression is that you are explicitly or implicitly discouraging public discourse on the forum by Quantopian employees. I think users could help you answer the question "What is Quantopian?" or even "What could Quantopian become?" if you are interested in engaging in the dialog.

One thing that would really help would be to have a public-facing bug/issue/idea/improvements/roadmap page, where you could document feedback from various sources (not only users, but employees, stakeholders/funders, etc.). Is this something you would entertain?

Another example:

https://www.quantopian.com/posts/daily-and-weekly-rebalancing-of-separate-alpha-factors-using-optimize-api

I contacted Q support twice and got no response. This would seem to be a really important topic. I would have at least expected a follow-up on the thread that you've registered it, and will eventually provide guidance.