Quantopian provides an opportunity for anyone, from anywhere, to get paid top-of-market rates for their intellectual property.
Your intellectual property should always be yours and no one should be allowed to profit from it without your consent.
In line with both these beliefs, we’ve created the following system to allow you to securely develop quantitative trading strategies, and get funded should they meet our criteria.
We’ll teach you how to work like a pro quant. Go through our getting started tutorial and learn how to use the Quantopian API. If you have developed a trading signal outside of Quantopian, upload it to Quantopian and dig deeper.
Get StartedThe Contest requires strategies pass 10 structural and risk criteria. If you pass the criteria, you have passed the first step of the funding process. Enter the contest to get daily feedback on your strategy.
Enter the ContestAfter we have enough out of sample evidence that it meets our criteria, it will be recommended to our investment team. If it’s a good fit for our portfolio, our investment team will reach out with an offer to license your algorithm for an allocation. When a licensed algorithm generates positive returns, we split the returns between the providers of the capital, Quantopian, and the author (you!).
Create a trading strategy on our platform which will continue to make money in the future.
As with any challenge, there are constraints on the problem. In our case, the constraints come from the type of strategy Quantopian would like to fund. There are many valid trading strategies out in the world that do not meet these constraints, but any strategy that gets funded by Quantopian should meet these.
To learn how to create a full strategy that meets our constraints, see the Getting Started Tutorial.
We are building a portfolio of uncorrelated investments. Financial theory, backed by evidence in practice, shows the benefits of aggregating a large number of uncorrelated returns streams. The key is that the algorithms should be uncorrelated.
With rare exceptions described in our Terms of Use, we don't look at your algorithm code. But we do look at some of the information that comes out of your backtest. We look at things like your performance, your risk metrics, how many securities you trade, how often you trade, and what the size of your positions are.
If your algorithm gets funded, we will split the returns between the investor, us, and you. Our agreement pays authors a royalty that is based on the performance of the strategy.
More specifically: funded algorithms are combined into the investment strategy operated by Quantopian. 10% of the investment strategy’s net profits are set aside in a royalty pool to align incentives for authors, Quantopian, and investors in the strategy. Each author’s share of that pool is proportional to their allocation or weight within the broader Quantopian investment strategy.
You will always own your intellectual property. Selected authors license their algorithm to Quantopian.
You don't have to pay for the platform or any of the data used in the strategy.
You have no downside risk: you do not owe anything if your strategy loses money.
You don't have to manage the algorithm operations, chained to your desk every day. We will operate the algorithm for you while you live your life and, we hope, focus on creating new strategies.
You aren't responsible for raising trading capital.
You will be paid a share of the author royalty pool, proportional to your algorithm’s weight within the total portfolio.
Our tools and data are world-class. Our open-source platform is built with the help and guidance of experts around the world.